Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘Could they be machines like you?’ Nissa asked.

‘I doubt it. For a start, look at the mess they’ve made of the place. It’s untidy — ramshackle. Not the robot way. I fear you will only find the answers you seek by going inside.’

‘Those look like standard docking systems to me — locks that will match ours,’ Kanu said. ‘We shouldn’t have any trouble coupling on.’ He grinned, finally shrugging off the cloud of bad feelings that had dogged him since their revival. ‘My god! I wasn’t expecting this. How the hell did anyone get here ahead of us?’

‘We knew someone was here,’ Swift said.

‘Yes — but our assumptions were all wrong. We thought it could only be Eunice, transported here by the Watchkeepers — we weren’t expecting some ship, some expedition that no one knows about. But they haven’t answered our hails or shown any sign of acknowledging our arrival.’

‘You think they might be dead?’ Nissa asked.

‘It’s possible. But their equipment and supplies may still be of use to us. We’ll need to bring Icebreaker in closer, but for now I’d sooner keep some distance.’

‘We can take Fall of Night . It’ll dock with anything down there, and at least I trust my own ship not to malfunction on us. Any objections, Swift?’

The figment bowed its head. ‘You appear to have matters adequately in hand.’

They closed distance to the shard until Paladin swallowed half the sky, the new Mandala turning its cryptic geometric gaze on them as the world swung past below. They were careful not to slip into the mirrors’ beams, for such a concentrated heat source could have inflicted severe damage on their already crippled vehicle.

They held off at one hundred kilometres, then went out in Nissa’s ship. They made a couple of circuits of the shard, scanning and mapping, then transmitting the composited data back to Icebreaker for safekeeping. It was eighteen kilometres across at its longest point, about eleven wide. At first glance, it appeared to be a small asteroid, or perhaps the husk of a comet. The more Kanu looked at it, though, the more he found himself wondering about the depression at one end. At first glance he had taken it for a natural feature, the lingering blemish of a deep impact or collision. Now they were closer, however, it looked much too symmetrical for that. Its circumference was perfectly circular and its interior face, as it sloped down into the shard, had the smooth-bored regularity of something carefully excavated. At its narrowing base was a flat surface like a wall, spanning the throat of a shaft that went deeper into the shard.

Nissa had picked out a landing point about a third of the way in from the start of the depression. She synchronised Fall of Night to the shard’s spin, then brought them in at steadily decreasing speed until they were almost at a walking pace. At the last moment, she rotated Fall of Night to align its ventral docking port with the equivalent structure on the rock and then used lateral thrust to complete the mating. Automatic clamps locked them into place and the status lights on her console indicated that the docking was secure. The shard’s rotation now subjected Fall of Night to centrifugal effects, meaning that it would fall away from the dock should the clamps fail — they felt like a fly hanging upside down on a ceiling. But if anything were to fail, Nissa said, it would not be the systems on her ship, and the structure to which they had docked looked adequately anchored into the surrounding rock and unlikely to tear itself away under the increased load.

They completed their spacesuit checks, locking down helmets, reviewing visor readouts, confirming that they could both see and address Swift, then went to the lock. They were under half a gee now and had to clamber up into it, but there were ladders and handholds in abundance. The lock was large enough to take both of them.

‘Air on the other side, if you believe that,’ Nissa said, directing his attention to the airlock’s status panel. ‘We’ll treat it as suspicious until proven otherwise.’

Kanu agreed wholeheartedly. He was uncomfortable, and for a moment could not pin down the precise origin of his disquiet. Then he remembered the airlock on the wrecked ship on Mars, the necessity for them to pass through it one at a time and the trap they had found inside.

‘Are you all right, Kanu?’ Nissa asked. ‘You’re breathing a little fast. Is your air supply normalised?’

He made a show of checking his cuff readout, with its blocky histograms of gas ratios. ‘All good.’

Swift, who was presently invisible, said, ‘I can adjust your anxiety, if that would assist matters. It’s well within my capabilities.’

Kanu shivered. ‘I’d rather not know that.’

‘And rather him in your skull than mine,’ Nissa said. ‘At least I know my feelings are real.’

The ship’s airlock cycled and they entered the corresponding part of the shard. Since the exterior elements of the lock had looked familiar enough, it did not surprise Kanu to find the interior provisions just as recognisable. It was neither strikingly modern nor particularly antique or alien. The technical readouts were even labelled in Swahili and Chinese, as they were on almost every ship he had been aboard.

‘Suit confirms that the air is good,’ Nissa said, ‘but we’ll take nothing for granted.’

‘Agreed,’ Kanu said.

There was power to operate the lock and illuminate the chamber and its readouts, but since locks usually carried independent power, that told them nothing about the rest of the shard. Still, Kanu drew some encouragement from the fact that the lock was operable and had not fused into useless immobility.

There was a lateral door, so they did not need to climb any further. Beyond the door was a service area equipped with some storage lockers and control panels, again of unremarkable design. An angled, armoured window looked down through the floor, out into space, allowing them a view of the still-docked Fall of Night . Low-level lighting was in evidence and some of the consoles still had active readouts, but Kanu did not know what to conclude from that. Perhaps the power had come on when the lock was activated and was even now draining the last drops of energy from nearby storage cells.

A set of stairs led up and away from the service area alongside a heavy-duty elevator. They opted for the stairs — their suits lacked power-assist, but in half a gee, Kanu did not think the ascent would be too arduous.

‘Why haven’t we heard about this place before?’ Nissa asked as they began their ascent, walking side by side up the short flight of stairs before reversing direction. ‘To organise and fund an interstellar expedition of this size — there’s no way it wouldn’t be in the public record. No matter how secretive you wanted to be, you couldn’t hide the departure of a starship.’

‘We haven’t even seen a starship. Maybe this rock is the starship.’

‘Like a holoship?’

‘Perhaps,’ Kanu said, ‘but they were slower than anything we have now, and they needed the economy of an entire solar system to build them. Whichever way you cut it, it’s hard to see how anyone did this. And why come here in the first place?’

‘Maybe they discovered the second Mandala ahead of everyone else and wanted to exploit it?’

‘To what end, though?’ said Kanu. ‘If there was something about the Mandalas you could exploit, wouldn’t the people on Crucible already have a head start?’

They must have ascended a hundred metres, doubling back over and over again, before the stairwell reached another room. It was larger than the one they had passed through below and more sparsely provisioned. Low-level illumination picked out the edges of its walls and ceiling. No control panels or lockers here, no windows — but there was a door, set into the wall opposite the stairwell. Twice as tall as Kanu, it was impressively braced and armoured, doubtless designed for emergency pressure containment. It looked as if it was meant to slide up into the ceiling, but there were no controls on this side.