Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

Kanu walked to it, grasped one of the brace pieces and tried forcing the entire door to slide up. The gesture was as futile as he had expected. It must have weighed several tonnes.

‘Any ideas, Swift?’ he asked. ‘We have cutting gear aboard Icebreaker , if need be.’

Swift was conversing with them now but had still not manifested as a visible figment. ‘We could undock and scout around for another airlock, perhaps? There was no shortage of options.’

Nissa was standing next to Kanu, hands on her hips. ‘Hello?’ she called, using her suit’s speaker. ‘Is there anyone here?’

‘I worry that the place is dead after all,’ Kanu said, his earlier enthusiasm beginning to ebb.

‘I don’t know,’ Nissa said. ‘It feels a little less dead the further inside we go. It would take life-support systems to keep air warm and breathable. I swear I can hear something, too.’

All Kanu could hear was his own breathing, too fast and ragged for his liking. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Try increasing your auditory pickup. Shall I show you how to do it?’

‘No, I’m fine.’

But he followed her lead, amplifying the suit’s pickup as far as it would go. There it was: a distant mechanical process, the hum of mechanisms. It could have been anything — generators, pumps, air scrubbers — but it meant there was more than stored power providing the signs of animation they had already witnessed. Machines were running; had perhaps been running since long before their arrival.

‘There’s something else,’ Nissa said. ‘Do you hear it?’

A steadily rising component now overlaid the low-level hum, as if some heavy thing were advancing slowly towards the room. It consisted of a repeating series of bass thuds, falling into a sort of haphazard rhythm — like the slow, ominous beating, Kanu thought, of some tremendous war drum. The slight irregularity of it contrasted with the continuous drone of the background machines. This was not something mechanical, and on a primal level he found it invoked a specific but nameless dread. If only they could see what was coming. But that huge door was windowless.

They had only just entered the shard, and now Kanu’s sole instinct was to return the way they had come, back down the staircase. But he could not turn. It was not simply the fear of running from one threat only to stumble into another. If they could not negotiate with the occupants of the shard, they were as good as dead anyway.

‘Do you know what that sound is, Swift?’

‘I’ve never encountered anything like it. You may have, but it will take some time to search your memories.’

The thudding slowed and stopped. Kanu had the impression that the origin of the sounds was now only a few metres from him on the other side of the huge door. An ominous reverberation, so low as to be almost subsonic, throbbed through the armour plating. It was a living sound, not the product of something mechanical.

‘I don’t think you need bother searching my memories,’ Kanu said.

A loud clunk signalled the rise of the door. It began to haul itself into the ceiling, a widening brightness at its base. Kanu and Nissa stood back in unison. His fear was all-consuming now, but to run would be futile, he knew. He allowed his hand to reach for hers. If she spurned that contact, so be it, but he could not bear to face this alone.

Her hand hesitated in his, then her fingers closed slightly. Glove to glove, barely a touch at all. But it was more than he had dared hope for.

Beyond the door was a blazing brightness that rammed around and through and between the giant forms standing on the other side. There were three of them. In the first dazzled instant of his viewing, before the door had risen fully into the ceiling, he thought he had been mistaken, that these were machines of some kind after all. They stood on massive, tree-like legs — four legs to each form. And in those first few glances, they looked mechanical, or at least shrouded in armour.

But no, these were indeed living creatures, and he recognised them for what they were.

Elephants.

It was cold in the long, sloping corridor. It came from deeper within the camp, a whispering planetary chill that felt as if it had travelled all the way from Orison’s dead core, clawing through shivering layers of rock and crust and dusty permafrost. It cut through their clothes, through their skin, and into their bones. Goma thought she could take a few minutes of it at most.

‘Let’s get a few things straight from the outset.’ Eunice was looking back at the party as she led the way into the deeper layers of her camp, her breath visible in the cold. ‘They are Tantors and only Tantors. Never elephants — that offends them terribly.’

‘How many?’ Goma asked, excited despite the cold.

‘Six.’

‘Six!’ Ru exclaimed.

‘My dear girl, you’ll have to make allowances for me — I can’t tell if you’re elated or disappointed.’

‘We’re delighted that Tantors still live,’ Goma said, presuming to speak for both of them. ‘On Crucible, the numbers weren’t sufficient to sustain them as a distinct subspecies. They had to breed back into the baseline elephant population, and in the process we’ve slowly lost whatever it was that made them special. Six is wonderful, of course, but we were hoping for a self-sustaining breeding group.’

‘You may still have one. There are six here with me, but hundreds — thousands — more in Zanzibar .’

‘Thousands!’ Goma exclaimed.

‘You might need to dial down your hopes a little. Zanzibar is where all our problems began — where I got on the wrong side of Dakota, and why I ended up here.’

‘You said Zanzibar ,’ said Dr Nhamedjo. ‘Do you seriously mean—’

‘You haven’t figured that out yet, have you? Well, we’ll come to Zanzibar in due course — that’s a whole other can of mealworms. The important point for now is that the six Tantors who live with me are what you’d call defectors. They sided with me when the others stuck with Dakota, and for that they were also banished. Actually, there were more than six, and these are the children of the original defectors. In truth, we all got off lightly. There were many who’d have been glad to see us killed, but Dakota had just enough residual respect for me to offer exile rather than execution. So they used one of their last long-range vehicles to drop us here, me and the Tantors, with sufficient equipment to build our happy little home. They stayed long enough to make sure we weren’t going to die and then abandoned us. And here we’ve been ever since.’

‘Were you here when you sent the original signal?’ Goma asked.

‘Yes — it was almost the first thing I did after setting up home. They didn’t want me to have any kind of transmitter, certainly nothing capable of squirting a signal across interstellar distances. Still, I’ve always been good at improvising — make do and mend. Eventually I patched something together that just about functioned, aimed it at Sixty-One Virginis, pressed “send” and here you are.’

‘Two centuries later,’ Goma said.

‘Yes, damn that Mr Einstein and his unreasonable insistence on causality and the inviolability of the speed of light. I still thought you’d get here a little quicker.’

‘We came as soon as we could,’ Goma answered.

‘You mentioned someone coming here ahead of us,’ Vasin said. ‘What did you mean by that?’

‘The other ship.’

‘There isn’t one,’ Vasin answered. ‘I would know. We’ve come alone, the sole expedition sent by our government. Even if Crucible launched the second starship after our departure, it could never have overtaken us.’