Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

Although he kept telling himself that they were lucky to have survived the Watchkeeper attack at all, the impact area was worse than he had feared. It was an open wound dozens of metres long and almost as deep, cut with cruel disregard into the ripe, vital organs of his starship. Gases were venting from numerous ruptured pipes, coiling out in glittering blue-grey nebulae.

‘Can you see this, Nissa?’

‘Yes, I have a feed from your helmet. It’s not pretty. I’m no expert, but I don’t think that’s going to be a five-minute repair job.’

‘No, it won’t.’

‘It’s worse than we thought,’ Swift said, then after a moment, he added, ‘We haven’t merely lost propulsion control. That area of the hull also contained your main directional antenna. With the exception of short-range communications, we are now without the means to send or receive transmissions.’

‘I’d say that was a catastrophe,’ Kanu said, ‘but no one was talking to us anyway.’

The hull was blackened in a wide area beyond the obvious limits of the wound itself, suggestive of a massive concentration of energy. He risked stepping nearer to the edge of the damaged section. Gas was still geysering out from multiple locations. It aggrieved Kanu to see any kind of pressure loss. Darkly, he began to wonder if this sort of damage was even repairable at all.

‘I need to take a closer look,’ Kanu said.

He bent down, preparing to resume his spidering progress, when something flashed white. There was no pain, and barely enough of an interval of lucidity before the coming of unconsciousness for him to register one simple truth.

He was no longer attached to anything.

He was falling into ever-darkening waters, each layer colder and heavier and stiller than the last. He was on his back, his face turned to the receding surface. He could still see some evidence of the sun, its radiance chopped into pieces by the waves, its light further diminished by the oppressive mass of water that now lay between him and the air. He reached out, trying to claw his way back to the light, but for all his slow thrashing he could not arrest his descent. He knew how to swim; that was not the problem. He was simply too heavy now, and the pull of the deep layers too powerful. He glanced beneath him, but could see nothing below except steadily mounting blackness. A little daylight still found its way to him now, but soon he would be down to a few struggling photons, feeble as glow-worms, and after that there would be nothing but darkness. An endless succession of moments in which he did not figure.

Something eclipsed the wavering sunlight. It was another kind of darkness, more concentrated than the general absence of illumination below him. It had a distinct core, like a negative shadow of the sun itself, and radiating from that core were wavering beams of darkness. It was swelling, stealing more and more of the precious light.

One of the wavering beams reached out towards him, stretching down to arrest his fall. He surrendered to it, allowing the dark limb to coil its padded extremity around his midriff.

‘Leviathan,’ Kanu said. And felt a surge of joy that his old friend had come back to him.

He remembered nothing of the return journey to Icebreaker . It was only later that he came to an understanding of what had happened to him — an explosion from the rupture point, the blast damaging his suit and sending him falling away from the ship, back towards Poseidon.

Nissa had chased him aboard Fall of Night , willingly placing herself at risk of another stinging attack from the Watchkeeper — knowing full well that her own ship was much less capable of surviving such an assault.

‘I caught you,’ she said. ‘Swung in sideways, matched speed, allowed you to drift into my lock. You were nearly dead. Even when I brought you in, got you out of the suit, I didn’t know if you were going to make it.’

‘I remember nothing.’

‘I’m not surprised. You were out cold. Swift was doing all the talking.’

‘Swift?’

‘Yes. Your other half.’

For a moment he had forgotten. He was still thinking of his old friend the kraken, the happiness he had felt knowing that Leviathan had again found a purpose in life.

‘Thank you for saving me,’ Kanu said, hesitantly, for there was something in her manner that left him disquietened. ‘Thank you for placing yourself in harm’s way for me.’

‘Self-interest played its part,’ Nissa replied, her tone businesslike. ‘I’d rather not have to fix and operate this starship on my own.’

‘Regardless of why you did it, I’m still grateful. But why can’t I move?’

‘Because you’re fixed to a surgical unit.’

He was lying on his back. He nodded slowly, stiffly, at last recognising his surroundings. She must have brought him to the medical bay, removed the outer layer of his suit and placed him on one of the auto-surgical platforms.

‘That can’t have been easy.’

‘I had some assistance. I explained to Swift what I was trying to do, and he helped. You were unconscious, but Swift could still move your body around.’

‘I see.’ There was a drift to this conversation that was not quite to his liking. He did not feel injured. Exhausted, confused, but not injured. Was there more wrong with him than he realised?

‘I put a gun to your head. Actually, more like a harpoon. I retrieved it from that body you found outside, the Regal. Do you remember the Regal?’

‘I do now.’

‘I brought the harpoon thing back inside with me. I don’t know whether it works or not, but that’s not really the point. Swift didn’t know either, and he wasn’t going to take a chance and find out. I needed a bargaining position, you see. Does that make sense to you?’

‘Perfect sense.’

‘It wasn’t my intention to kill you — if it had been, I could have just let you fall away from the ship — but we do need to change our working relationship.’

‘In what way?’ Kanu asked, with a forced levity.

‘I accept the situation. I accept that Swift got inside your skull and dragged us across interstellar space. Nothing’s going to change that. And now that we’re here, I’m not about to turn my back on these discoveries. I want answers, too — and I want to survive, and to fix this ship. Swift says we can reach Paladin in about a year, if Fall of Night shoves Icebreaker into the right transfer orbit. I did suggest we take Fall of Night instead, get there quicker, but Swift argued me out of that — we need this ship to return to Earth, and I accept that. But everything else? We do things as equals from now on.’

‘As far as I’m concerned, we’ve been on equal terms since we reached this system.’

‘Fine words, Kanu, but from my position things look a little asymmetric. There’s the small matter of Swift. Now, I’m not so naive as to think I can cut him out of your head like a disease — nor would I want to.’

‘Good. That’s good.’

‘You and Swift got us into this; it’ll take both of you to get us out of it. But as I said, things have to change. Swift and I have been talking, and we’ve come to a mutually acceptable solution. The auto-surgeon is going to put a small implant into your head — a very simple device, nothing complicated. It will address your visual and auditory centres, in effect eavesdropping on your private conversations.’

‘Are you absolutely sure you want to go through with this?’

‘Yes, I’m quite sure. And here’s the clever part. When it’s done with you, the surgeon will reactivate some of my own latent neuromachinery, the stuff I’ve been carrying around in my head since the fall of the Mechanism. It’ll establish a communications protocol between the two sets of implants. Do you understand what that means?’