Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘Wait,’ Nissa said.

‘Yes?’

‘It is a risk.’

‘Indeed. But there are no risk-free options.’

‘All the same… no. We don’t cut and run. Your option — is that still valid?’

‘For the moment.’

‘Then do it. Get us close to that fragment, like you said. There are forty-five moons — I presume they can’t all see us at the same time?’

‘If sight lines are relevant, then we are presently within the range of visibility of thirteen moons, although the number will fluctuate as we continue our course.’

‘Are you clever, Swift? As clever as Kanu thinks you are?’

‘I doubt anyone is that clever.’

‘Then here’s a test for you. When the drive comes on, make sure we’re as invisible as we can be. Use that fragment to its maximum advantage.’

‘You are presenting me with a somewhat challenging N-body problem.’

‘I’ll tell you what’s challenging , Swift — being dragged fifty fucking light-years across the galaxy without my consent. So rise to the occasion. You said the choice was mine — this is my choice.’

‘And you could not have put it more eloquently, Nissa. Well, I do appreciate a challenge, and I shall apply myself to the matter with alacrity. This will take a few moments… fortunately, we can already draw on Icebreaker ’s detailed model of the moons to minimise our visibility.’

When Swift returned to his console, Kanu again had the strange experience of seeing his hands whip across the controls, his vision blurring with the speed of his eyes’ jolting attentional shifts. It felt strange to him; it must look monstrous to Nissa.

But necessary. As resentful as he felt — it was not remotely pleasant to be usurped from control of his own body — he understood why Swift had done it. To surrender before Nissa, to give her not just a say in her fate but absolute control — it was the only thing that might prompt her to see Swift as an ally rather than a parasite.

A risk. But as Swift had said, there were no risk-free options.

After a few minutes, Swift said, ‘It’s done. I’m relinquishing Kanu. We’ll make our course change in a completely automated fashion, beginning in about seven minutes. It can be revoked at any point. Once we start, though, I would strongly suggest we continue.’

Kanu had to take a deep breath as he returned to himself — Swift had drawn deeply from the well of his energies.

‘Remind me not to let him do that too often.’

Nissa looked at him through guarded eyes. ‘Do you have a choice?’

‘I thought I did.’

‘He could take you over completely, couldn’t he? If he can lock you out at that level, what’s to stop him?’

‘Nothing,’ Kanu said. ‘Except his respect for the trust I had in him.’

‘And is that trust still intact?’

‘Battered, but it will heal. I think he did the right thing.’

‘Good. But I take it this is the point where you start trying to argue me out of my decision?’

‘No,’ Kanu said, after a moment of reflection. ‘I don’t know which of us is right. But Swift had an idea, and you’ve chosen it, and that’s good enough for me. Whatever happens, it should be interesting — you realise no one has ever come as close to a Watchkeeper as we’re about to?’

‘Dead Watchkeepers don’t count. Anyway, your mother… one of your mothers — she’d say differently, wouldn’t she?’

‘I suppose she would,’ Kanu said. ‘But the Watchkeeper came to Chiku, not the other way round.’

It was a long seven minutes — time enough for doubts and second-guessing. But their nerve held, and at the appointed moment, Icebreaker commenced its course change. It was as hard and sudden as Swift had warned, an assault to the frailty of the human body, but they were ready for it and the shock was bearable. Kanu sensed himself on the verge of blacking out, but unconsciousness never quite came and his thoughts remained lucid. The course correction continued for several minutes, a succession of nerve-rattling instants, any one of which could have seen some dreadful reprisal from the moons. But no attack came. Perhaps they were too small to draw the moons’ attention, or Swift had timed their course change accurately enough to avoid drawing down their fire. Or perhaps, Kanu mused, all this destruction was the work of millions of years ago, and they had never been in harm’s way.

When the engine stopped, they had arrived within a whisker of the broken Watchkeeper. Icebreaker was less than the width of its own hull from the skin of the alien machine. There had been no sign of life — of activation — from a distance, and there was none now they were closer. The drifting hulk was warm on one side, cool on the other, but only because it kept one side turned to Gliese 163.

It was the middle section of a Watchkeeper, severed at both ends — a snipped-off cone — and with a long, deep, lateral gouge running the length of its warm side. They decided to chance another small thrust correction to place Icebreaker inside the thermal concealment of that gouge. Although they were floating next to part of a Watchkeeper, the ruin of the alien machine was still hundreds of times larger than Kanu’s ship, and the gouge was deep enough to hide them completely.

They came to a halt, holding station in their improvised hideaway. The walls and floor of the wound offered glimpses of the Watchkeeper’s secret interior — a puzzle of vast and silent mechanisms packed as tightly as intestines — but only a glimpse. They could see no deeper than the outermost viscera, and no blue glow shone from the depths to elucidate the overlying structures.

A living Watchkeeper was awesome enough, Kanu thought. But a dead one was something more because it testified to a greater power — something with the capability to kill a robot as large as a moon.

‘We should be safe now,’ he said, ‘but just to be certain we’ll power down everything we don’t need and sit here as quietly as we can. Swift — can you compute an optimum escape profile for us?’

‘Consider it done, Kanu. And thereafter? Resume a higher orbit, beyond the moons? It won’t cost us much more energy.’

‘No — we’re not ready for this place just yet. I’ll admit it — I’m a little spooked.’

‘Entirely understandable. Imagine how I feel — another machine intelligence, witnessing butchery on this scale. So where should we go next?’

‘I think it’s obvious,’ Kanu said. ‘Paladin. And hope there are no nasty surprises waiting for us there.’

‘There are no nasty surprises,’ Swift said, ‘only degrees of unpreparedness.’

Swift’s plan had them waiting ten hours as the fragment’s orbit carried it beyond the diameter of the orbit of the outermost moon. It transpired that the Watchkeeper had a measurable gravitational field — strong enough that they had to resist its pull with a whisper of micro-thrust, as if they were moored next to an asteroid. There should have been no surprise in that, but in no other context had the mass of a Watchkeeper ever been detected. It was as if — being dead — some cloaking or mass-negation effect had now ceased to function.

To control gravity, to make mass vanish like a palmed card — here were implicit technological secrets which, suitably unravelled, might spur a thousand industrial revolutions. But Kanu and his companions could only content themselves with the gathering of data. The understanding — the exploitation — would have to be left to other minds, in other solar systems, if it could be done at all.

Still, here was another solid discovery to add to the puzzles they had already found. A new Mandala, wheels taller than the sky and a glimpse into the physics of the Watchkeepers. If Kanu did nothing else with his life, these findings would be achievement enough. The very thought of it — the idea of contributing something this big to the sum of human knowledge — brought him solace. It was good to have done something useful, and to have survived until now.