Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

Had he really slept, or spent a year sleepwalking his own vessel?

But no, here he was — emerging from skipover, stiff and cold and groggy but relieved to find himself in something as unsparingly specific in its annoyances as reality. His back ached, his neck itched. He could feel where the edge of a fingernail had ripped itself from the quick. Dreams never bothered with that sort of detail.

He waited until he had the strength to move, then hauled himself out of the casket, bones aching, muscles weak, sense of balance off-kilter. It was never good — even a year in skipover was a penitence. Nausea hit him and he dry-heaved into a metal pan, coughing up only a few strands of pinkish phlegm. His throat felt scraped raw as if by broken glass. Never mind, though — he was awake, and alive, and out of the coils of those dreams. Much more of that, he felt certain, and he would have gone mad.

Vision still blurry, he fumbled his way to Nissa’s casket. Condensation beaded the unit’s hood and the medical display showed traces of rousing brain activity. She was coming out of skipover as well, but with a slight delay compared to his own revival. It happened; no two physiologies responded in exactly the same way.

Kanu washed, and some of his discomfort began to ebb. He went to the bridge, checked that the ship was in no worse state now than when they had gone to sleep. The repair processes were proceeding to schedule, although there was still much more to be done.

He boiled water and made chai, enough for two of them.

Then he knelt next to her casket and waited for the return of life.

‘Someone’s in there,’ Nissa said. ‘People, with machines and equipment. Things that can help us fix your poor little broken starship.’

‘We’ll ask nicely,’ Kanu said. ‘What else can we do?’

They had both been awake for several hours, both of them feeling slightly groggy and frayed around the edges but otherwise unaffected by the skipover interval. Nissa was eating a plate of grapefruit while seated in her command chair, loosely gowned and with one leg crossed over the other. Her hair had not had time to grow back between the skipover episodes, still only a shadow of stubble across her scalp.

Up on the main display was their best view of the shard, overlaid with contours and graphics showing thermal, compositional and geomorphological properties.

They had gained the answer to at least one of the mysteries as soon as they woke. The volcano-like hot spots Kanu had noticed from halfway across the system were evidence of a technological support infrastructure — the signatures of a power-generation system.

Power that was being still used for something.

Nissa was right: someone had to be in there.

‘I’d like to know what Swift makes of this,’ Nissa said.

‘We’ll have his opinion sooner or later. Probably more of it than we want or need.’

‘Why is he keeping a low profile? Do you think there’s something wrong with the implant protocol?’

‘If I could see him but not you, I’d say that was the case. But I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of Swift since I woke. He’s here, though. I’m certain of that. I think he’s just allowing us some privacy.’

‘While listening to everything we’re saying?’

‘He can’t fight what he is. Can you, Swift? Well, you’re missing out on all the fun here, leaving the analysis to Nissa and me, although we appear to be making progress without your input. Do you see those hot spots? They’re only a little cooler than the surface of Gliese 163. They’re pools of reflected and concentrated sunlight, gathered and directed onto the shard’s surface. There must be heat-transfer elements under those hot spots, turning the sunlight into power. We found the optical elements, too — all on our own. Backtracked the paths, identified four extremely dim infrared signatures, also in orbit around Paladin but at a higher elevation than the shard. Mirrors, Swift — each a few kilometres across. Aren’t you impressed?’

There would never be a time when at least one of the mirrors was not in direct sight of Gliese 163. Their function was to gather the star’s energy and concentrate it with extreme accuracy onto the receptor sites on the shard’s surface. Controlling the mirror satellites required finesse to direct their beams with the same precision as the fortress stations spinning around Mars. On the other hand, solar energy was an old-fashioned and inflexible power source. Icebreaker ’s own Chibesa core could easily duplicate the incident power of those beams, and it could be turned on and off and ramped up to higher output at will.

Only someone lacking Chibesa technology of their own would need those mirrors.

As they came in closer still, so the overall shape and nature of the shard became clearer. It was irregular, a tawny-black lump peppered with craters and veined with fissures. It turned slowly on its longest axis, about once every two minutes, like a lump of meat on a spit. A deep, mouthlike depression lay at one end of it. Like the Watchkeepers’ corpses, it appeared to have once been part of some larger body — there was an ominously clean, almost planar surface cutting diagonally across the other side of the shard from the depression. Perhaps it had also fallen foul of the Poseidon defences, or something similar guarding Paladin.

But that did not account for the evidence of human habitation. Lodged among the craters and veins — even spilling out across the sheer face — were glints of silver and gold arranged in lines and grids and clusters, and at the nodes of these brighter threads were what Kanu instinctively recognised as a very human technology of spacecraft berths, signalling dishes, airlocks and large-scale cargo docks. The hot spots were now revealed to be circular grids criss-crossed with a quilting of pipes. Fluid pumped through those grids and heated by the beamed energy would be used to drive electrical generators. Once cooled, the fluid could be sent through the grids again, and the cycle repeated endlessly. The docks and berths, though absent of visible spacecraft, explained how the satellite mirrors must have been deployed and maintained.

Kanu stared at the image, conscious that once again he had more questions than answers. How had this come to be? Who had put this thing in orbit around Paladin?

Who — if anyone — still made use of it?

‘I felt a little discretion was called for,’ Swift said quietly, ‘but I am very glad that you have been missing me.’

There he was now, standing off to their right, hands clasped before him like a patiently waiting servant. It was more as if Kanu had managed not to notice his presence until that moment, implying some deep and skilful doctoring of his attentive faculties.

‘I wondered if you’d got lost in skipover,’ Kanu said.

‘After enduring it once? No — there was no danger of that. I will say this, though — it’s a very odd thing not to be conscious. To be — to all intents and purposes — dead. Neither gathering nor generating information, as cold and changeless as eternity. How do you humans live with the thought of that hanging over every moment of your pitifully short existences?’

‘We don’t,’ Kanu said. ‘We just get on with it.’

Nissa spooned grapefruit into her mouth and then used the spoon as a pointer. ‘Speaking of getting on with things — do you want to hazard a guess as to why they aren’t sending?’

‘Maybe they were sending, and now they’re not,’ Swift ventured.

‘Is that the best you’ve got?’

‘For the moment, Nissa.’

‘Those mirrors haven’t wandered off-course,’ Kanu said.

‘A good control system, then,’ said Swift. ‘Or there are occupants, but they are simply not particularly talkative.’