Alastair Reynolds: On the Steel Breeze

Chiku was glad of it. She had visited Kappa a few times but did not know it anywhere near as well as the residential and administrative chambers where she spent most of her days.

‘How are your eyes, Gonithi?’ Chiku asked.

‘Fine enough now.’ Namboze paused. ‘Wait a moment. Adjusting my amplification.’

Chiku did likewise. It took an effort of will to remember the subvocal aug commands, so little did she use them. She swept her vision across the blackness and pointed. ‘Some lights over there, moving. Must be the sweep team from the next entrance along.’

They walked down the ramp, the luminous patterning of their own suits casting two moving puddles of light as they descended. Chiku activated her crown-mounted lamp and swept the beam before her. It glanced off the sides of low, rectangular, mostly windowless buildings, reaching away on either side of a narrow thoroughfare. Some of the buildings appeared superficially intact, but many were now ruined: torn apart by the blast and decompression, or crumpled under the debris that had come raining down on them in the moments after the blowout. The thoroughfare was littered with junk: huge, scab-like chunks of wall cladding; mangled machines of unidentifiable origin; the corpses of uprooted and fallen trees; and the rubble and flattened carcasses of destroyed buildings. And nowhere a light or hint of life, save that provided by the rescue parties.

They reached the base of the ramp and began picking their way along the thoroughfare. Chiku’s suit was sniffing the environment for human life-signs, taking care to ignore Namboze and the other searchers. So far, nothing. They pushed on, the thoroughfare connecting with another. They reached one of the buildings on their search list. On the overlay it was outlined in blue, pulsing gently – a white cube with doors and windows on the lowest floor, but otherwise blank. A tree, uprooted from elsewhere, impaled its roof. A mass of house-sized debris had collapsed against the aft-facing wall. Otherwise the building’s integrity looked good.

‘This is Chiku,’ she said, calling back to the search coordinators in the pod terminal. ‘Gonithi and I have reached our first target building. The door’s still closed – doesn’t look as if anyone’s opened it before us. We’re going in.’

‘Tag it on your way out,’ the coordinator told her. ‘And watch your step in there.’

‘We will,’ Chiku replied.

Only a handful of buildings in Kappa were capable of retaining air in the event of decompression, so those were the first to be searched. Most of the damage appeared to have been caused by the blowout rather than the flash that preceded it. Chiku had no intention of voicing theories in the junior politician’s presence, but it was beginning to look unlikely that the blast had originated inside Kappa itself. If the force of an explosion within Kappa had been sufficient to punch right through Zanzibar ’s skin – through tens of metres of solid rock – there would be nothing left within the chamber.

Therefore the blast could only have originated in the chamber’s skin.

An airlock protected the building, but it had not retained atmosphere. Chiku and Namboze searched the pitch-black interior – a maze of corridors and bioscience laboratories, judging by the glass-walled rooms they passed – until they found their way to the rear of the structure, where its shell had been pierced by debris. They found bodies on the second floor: a woman slumped in a corridor, still clutching research notes – Chiku imagined the gale tearing the air from her lungs, the life from her body, but somehow she had held on to those notes. Two people were still seated on high stools at their desks – the blast of decompression had shoved their equipment and notes to one end of the table, like a bar being cleared for a brawl, but somehow they remained upright at their posts. On the next floor, a young man lay in a corridor, not far from a lavatory. They found another person sprawled halfway down the connecting staircase, her leg broken.

Judging by their postures none of these people had been trying to get to safety. Chiku doubted that there had been more than a couple of seconds of awareness before the air roared out. Unconsciousness would have followed very swiftly, followed by death. She doubted that there had been time for fear.

Just surprise.

Chiku and Namboze tagged the bodies’ locations. Dedicated medical teams would arrive in time to preserve the corpses in vacuum with immense and loving care. Non-invasive methods would be used to assess neural damage. If there was even the slightest possibility of resurrection, the bodies would be shipped downstream to one of the holoships with sufficiently advanced medical techniques to carry out the process.

They tagged the airlock as they exited and moved on.

Their route to the next building brought them fearfully close to the wound in the world. A block ahead, the thoroughfare and its lines of flanking research buildings simply ended. The ground wrenched down, cracked and fissured, arcing and steepening to vertical. The wound was circular, maybe four hundred metres across. They climbed a ramp to get a better view, and looked right down into a circle of stars and blackness.

Shafts and tunnels and service ducts threaded Zanzibar ’s skin. They glowed in different colours on the overlay, coded for function and annotated for age, origin and destination. Many were disused or mothballed. Some were still weeping air or fluid – white or ghost-blue secretions cataracting into darkness. A tiny, trifling amount compared to the total resource load of the holoship, but it pained Chiku as much as the sight of her own blood would have.

Crucible was still a very long way off.

‘What was here?’ Namboze asked, indicating the missing terrain with a sweep of her lit-up arm.

Chiku knew. She had already consulted the suit’s map. ‘Various things. But the main one was Travertine’s physics lab.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I wouldn’t have said it otherwise.’

Namboze was uncowed by Chiku’s testy tone. ‘The explosion, whatever it was, must have started down in that bedrock, don’t you think?’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘There’d be a lot more damage to the surface structures, if it had begun above ground.’

Namboze’s conclusion matched Chiku’s, but that didn’t make her like it any better.

‘We’ll leave the explanation to the specialists, Gonithi,’ she said firmly. ‘Our job’s to look for survivors.’

She was glad that their search assignment took them no closer to the edge. They located and searched another building a few blocks from the first, standing on its own in what would have been an area of gently stepped wooded parkland, had most of the trees not been plucked from the ground. The building’s peeled-back roof had allowed atmosphere to vent from most of its levels, and they found no survivors on any of the airless floors. The basement – which had maintained pressure despite the loss of the roof – contained only a mindless floor-scrubbing machine still going about its duties.

The day had already brought more bodies, more evidence of human mortality, than Chiku had confronted in her entire life. But on some numb level she knew they had been lucky. Many of Kappa’s laboratories and research facilities required only a skeleton staff. Some of them, judging by the reports coming in from the other search parties, had been running on a purely automated basis. Experiments in plant nutrition, soil hydration and so on, once established, could be set to run unsupervised.

Yet the scale of destruction here was still almost unthinkable, and the loss of life might tally in the high hundreds or even low thousands once all the buildings had been searched. By any measure, this was a tragedy. But it could have been so much worse, had it happened in one of the densely populated chambers. Tens of thousands, easily. A civic catastrophe to equal almost anything that had happened since departure.