Alastair Reynolds: On the Steel Breeze

Gases were still venting. Air, water vapour, other critical volatiles… it pained Chiku to think of how little they could afford to spare. The winding corkscrew emulated a galactic whorl, the Milky Way in miniature.

Suddenly, the gush of gases ebbed to a trickle.

‘Containment control,’ Noah said. ‘They’ve sealed that chamber, whichever one just ruptured. It’s bleeding dry.’

‘What was in it?’ Namboze asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ Chiku said. It was difficult to relate this external view to her mental map of the holoship’s interior.

‘Take us in,’ Noah told the taxi. ‘Minimum approach speed.’

By the time they neared the docking hub, the trickle of escaping gases had been all but staunched. Emergency crews were already at work, spilling out of hull locks and docking bays in service craft and individual vacuum suits. By now they would surely be entering the compromised chamber from within Zanzibar as well. Chiku watched the figures as they traversed the outer skin, tiny and beetle-bright in their luminous vacuum gear. With Zanzibar still rotating – Chair Utomi had yet to order a spindown, and might not judge matters serious enough to warrant such a drastic measure – the emergency crews were effectively hanging upside down, only a slip away from being snatched into space.

The coming and going of service vehicles delayed docking for thirty minutes. The shuttle waited its turn, then fell into the open maw of the polar aperture.

Zanzibar, like Malabar, had the proportions of a fat ellipsoid. All the holoships looked similar from the outside, and all were within a few kilometres of being the same size. Fifty kilometre walnuts, skewered on the long axis of their engines.

Chiku had seen them being born, in the year before she went to Quorum Binding. She had gone out to the birthing orbits from Triton, on a sumptuous high-burn liner the size of a small city-state. The holoships were strung out like beads on an invisible wire, all at varying stages of completion. Gravity tractors hauled in asteroids, mountains of rock and ice selected for size, composition and stability, raw matter for the shaping. They chiselled and cored the asteroids, voiding mighty chambers large enough to swallow the liner a thousand times over. They fused and glued loosely-bound rubble piles, infiltrated rock and ice with webs of spiderfibre reinforcement, until they had the integrity to withstand spin and the ferocious, barely-contained impulse of a truly monstrous Chibesa engine. They bottled and pressurised the interior chambers, then gifted them with warmth and water and ten thousand forms of plant and animal life. Then they built towns, cities and parks, schools, hospitals and seats of government, and allowed people to begin moving in, eager droves of them, in their hundreds and thousands. What had been a shell became a place.

Last of all, the Chibesa engines were lit. With the slowness of clouds the readied arks began to pull away from the birthing orbits. They went out in caravans, for mutual support. Each caravan was part of a larger flow of holoships, assigned to a particular solar system. Hundreds, for the most popular target systems. Typically a dozen or so holoships would be organised into a local caravan, with one or more light-years between each caravan.

It took years, decades, for the holoships to reach their cruising speeds. But once that had been attained – presently a whisker under thirteen per cent of the speed of light – there was no immediate requirement to re-employ their engines. Some of the holoships, like Zanzibar, had partially dismantled their engines so that the forward and aft polar apertures could be used for the docking of large ships. The dismantled components were moved into secondary chambers, like the pieces of an ominous puzzle.

Chiku’s little vessel was now sliding into the space that would once have been occupied by the end of the Chibesa engine. Larger ships, shuttles and taxis were attached around the curving walls, linked by connecting tubes and service umbilicals. The taxi matched rotation, docked. Clamps secured and the airlock connector grappled into place.

Chiku set about loosening her restraints. ‘An hour ago, our only concern was how our presentation had gone down.’

‘The elephants are safe, aren’t they?’ Namboze asked. ‘Whatever was in that chamber, that’s nowhere near the elephants.’

‘They should be all right,’ Chiku said. ‘The damage is nowhere near the main community cores, either, or the school chamber.’

They disembarked from the taxi. Chiku had been anticipating chaos in the processing area on the other side of the lock, but everything was surprisingly ordered, albeit busier than usual, and with an unmistakable air of heightened tension. Walls were alive with status reports – images and text updates, refreshing and scrolling constantly. Pulsing bars of red, outlining doors and windows, signified a shift to emergency conditions.

Chiku struggled to remember the last time this had happened. The Pemba loss, perhaps. Maybe the occasional emergency drill. But even those were extremely uncommon.

Chair Utomi, busy with crisis management, had tasked another Assembly member to meet the diplomatic party at the dock. Chiku was only slightly surprised to see her old colleague Sou-Chun Lo.

‘Have you any idea what happened?’ Namboze asked.

‘Whatever it was, it doesn’t seem to have gone beyond Kappa Chamber. We’re hoping and praying that was the end of it.’

‘Kappa Chamber,’ Chiku echoed in a low voice. A weird chime of déjà vu, there and gone in a moment.

‘Chiku, Noah – your children and immediate family have been accounted for and are safe,’ said Sou-Chun Lo. ‘Gonithi – there’s no immediate reason to worry for your friends and colleagues. I doubt any of them were in Kappa, unless they had a direct connection to any of the research programmes.’

Chiku, Noah and Namboze nodded their thanks.

‘You have all been working hard,’ Sou-Chun Lo said, steepling her fingers in a prayer-like gesture. ‘You should go home now.’

‘Provided there are suits to spare,’ Noah said, ‘Chiku and I intend to assist with the search in Kappa.’

Chiku flicked a glance at her husband. They had discussed no such thing.

‘There is no need, really,’ Sou-Chun Lo said kindly. ‘You have all done more than enough for the committee in recent days. Your particular commitment has been noted, Chiku.’

She wondered if that was a reference to their hopes of obtaining skipover.

‘I’d still like to help,’ Noah said.

Chiku shook her head. ‘You can help by going and finding the children – they must be scared out of their wits. I can take care of myself here. It’s important that someone from the Assembly gets their hands dirty in the rescue effort, so it may as well be me.’

‘I want to help, too,’ Namboze said. ‘I have suit and field medical experience.’

‘We’re not expecting to find many alive,’ Sou-Chun cautioned. ‘You should be ready for that. It’s going to be messy.’

‘We know,’ said Chiku. ‘We saw the explosion.’ But tired as she was, she made an effort to strike a positive note. ‘Still, there’s a chance a few may have survived the blast and managed to get to suits, or pressurised structures, or even into the service tunnels under the chamber. Besides, the whole place has to be searched regardless of the likelihood of finding anyone alive. We need to know what happened in there, and whether it continues to pose a risk to us.’

‘There are no immediate structural concerns,’ Sou-Chun said. ‘The blast and pressure loss deflected our course by a very small amount, but our trimming motors can easily correct for that. Most of the citizens wouldn’t have felt anything – the first they knew of the accident was when Utomi appeared in their homes.’