Alastair Reynolds: Poseidon's Wake

‘Fifty-six minutes,’ Swift said, almost apologetically. ‘I am sorry to insist on a point of diplomacy, but the agreed time began the moment your skids touched our soil.’

They made a beeline for the side of the wreck — a shadowed slab, dense with machinery. The side where the entrance point had been identified curved back over their heads. Kanu had the dizzy sensation that it was in a constant slow topple, about to bury the ambassadorial party.

‘That lock is tiny!’ Dalal said.

‘Emergency egress only,’ Lucien said. ‘The cargo locks are buried, or much too high up for us to reach in the time we have.’

Even the emergency lock was some distance above their heads, and they had to scramble up to it one at a time using pipes and handholds projecting from the wrecked hull. There was a narrow ledge beneath the lock and extending to one side of it. Korsakov was the first to reach the ledge, its width just taking his feet. He traversed sideways, one hand reaching to his left, the other hanging on to a rail over his head.

Dalal and Lucien went next, and then Kanu. Swift monkeyed up alongside them with dismaying agility, pausing only to scuff dust from the collar of his coat.

‘Lock power is still active,’ Korsakov announced. ‘I am going to try and open it.’ Continuing to brace himself with his right hand, he folded aside an armoured panel to access a bank of controls.

‘Well?’ Lucien asked.

‘Cycling,’ Korsakov said. ‘But this is, as Dalal said, a very small lock. I doubt it will hold more than one of us at a time.’

‘We’ll see you on the other side,’ Kanu said. ‘It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.’

‘Under the terms of our arrangement,’ Swift said, ‘I must not be the last to enter.’

‘We weren’t about to forget you,’ Lucien muttered.

Korsakov was soon inside the lock with the outer door sealed and the chamber pressurising. His voice sounded as clear as before. ‘The lock is reaching normal pressure. I will not, of course, be so foolish as to remove my helmet, and I advise the rest of you to follow my example.’

‘Tell us when the inner door opens,’ Dalal said.

‘It is doing just that, Garudi. I am stepping through into the ship. There is heat and power and emergency lighting, but no immediate sign of life.’

‘Garudi is next, then Lucien,’ Kanu said. ‘I’ll allow Swift to enter before me. Is that arrangement acceptable to all parties?’

There was no dissent, and so Dalal cycled through the lock next. She joined Korsakov on the other side, confirming his initial observations. ‘Much less structural damage than I was expecting. Everything looks straight and there’s still power, as Yevgeny says. The lower levels must have absorbed a lot of the impact.’

‘Bad news for anyone down there,’ Lucien said.

Kanu waited for the Consolidation ambassador to pass through the lock. Save for himself, the breathing members of the party were now all inside the wreck. It was just Kanu and the robot, alone under the sky of Mars.

‘Now your turn,’ he told Swift.

‘Thank you, Kanu. It’s rather irksome that I must use the lock in the first place, but there’s no avoiding it.’

‘When robots build ships, you can show us how it’s done.’

‘We shan’t build ships, Kanu. We shall become them.’

He waited on the ledge until Swift had gone through, and then counted the long seconds until the lock was ready to admit him. He cursed himself for forgetting to zero his suit clock the moment they landed on Mars.

‘How long have we been here?’ he asked Dalal when he finally joined the others.

‘Thirteen minutes just to get this far. And we’ll need to allow the same amount of time to get out.’

Kanu nodded within his helmet. Panels and signs were still aglow, and dim yellow service lighting offered glimpses into adjoining passageways and compartments.

‘We’ll never sweep the whole thing,’ he said, ‘so we won’t try. For a start, I think we can rule out survivors in the lower levels. But we should be able to reach the control core easily enough.’

‘It would be unwise to raise your hopes,’ Lucien said.

‘I’m not.’

‘Regardless, Kanu is correct,’ Dalal said. ‘For the sake of making our governments look good, we must go through the motions.’

‘Steady with talk like that,’ Kanu said. ‘They’ll hang you for honesty.’

Dalal grinned back at him through her faceplate. ‘Being hanged is the least of my present worries.’

The slope of the floor made progress tricky, but they found their way to the central trunk elevator without too much trouble.

Korsakov found the control panel and punched the big manual button to summon their ride. It came rattling and groaning along its shaft, squealing and protesting. Kanu supposed that they were lucky the elevator was working at all, after the impact the craft had sustained. But he would have welcomed any excuse to abandon the search and return to the flier.

The ambassadors entered the elevator, followed by Swift, and the car began to ascend, bucking and jerking as it hit some obstruction.

‘It is not easy to see what these Reclamationists were hoping to achieve,’ Swift said, as if he felt an obligation to make conversation.

‘It might be a symbolic gesture,’ Kanu said. ‘Reclaiming a piece of Mars, if only for a few days.’

‘With their corpses?’ Swift asked.

‘Maybe they hoped to survive long enough to issue some kind of statement, a declaration of sovereignty or suchlike.’

‘I still fail to see the logic. What use is this dry, airless world to you?’

‘No practical use at all,’ Kanu said as the elevator halted and the doors opened. ‘But we can’t bear the thought of someone else having it.’

The control deck was a semicircular room with passages branching off it and a wide armoured window occupying one arc of the curved wall. Some of the console displays were still active, and Korsakov was confident enough to start flipping the heavy manual control switches. With a clunk and whine, the window’s armoured shuttering began to retract.

They were higher on Mars now than when they landed, a good twenty levels up, and from this elevation — surveying the oddly tilted landscape — Kanu could easily make out the luminous, pastel-shaded anthills of three distant robot cities. Even closer, one of their connecting tentacles formed a distinct glowing ridge-line, like the spine of a half-buried sea-monster. He watched, partly mesmerised, as lights raced along the spine with the speed of shooting stars.

‘Do those cities have names, Swift?’

‘I am not sure you would perceive them as “cities”, Kanu. “Nodes” or “hubs” would be more accurate. Functional modules, like your own brain compartmentalisation. But yes, they do have distinct signifiers. Although again, “name” may be stretching things a little—’

‘When you’re done chatting,’ Korsakov said, ‘we could begin searching the ship with these internal sensors.’ He was bending over a console, tapping keys. Displays were coming online, showing blueprints and cross sections, and he drew their attention to a couple of them. ‘These areas appear to contain air, and these are where the ship seems to have lost pressure.’

‘Given the lack of time available to us,’ Dalal said, ‘it’ll be a token search. But at least we can go home saying we did the best we could.’

‘Should my compatriots find organic material,’ Swift said, ‘we would treat it with the utmost respect.’

‘Thank you, Swift,’ Kanu said, ‘but I’m not sure being shredded and incorporated into your neural-logic networks is the fate we’d want for our loved ones. Even if you did it respectfully.’