Alastair Reynolds - On the Steel Breeze

She knelt down and touched the mossy green surface under her feet. Her hands were gloved, but Chiku knew that the fine, translucent fabric was wired for the same kind of haptic feedback built into spacesuits. She would be feeling every nuance of texture and temperature.

Wordlessly, Namboze stood and walked a few paces towards one of the larger plants. Its broad leaves were fat with a lateral groove and a kind of leathery dimpling, the whole leaf drooling like some huge salacious tongue. Namboze stroked it, first with her fingers and then with the back of her hand.

‘The stupid thing,’ she said, voice only slightly muffled by the mask and the intervening containment membrane, ‘would be to remove my gloves. But they’re not picking up anything obviously toxic.’

‘Doctor Aziba,’ Chiku said. ‘Would you like to go next?’

He was still nursing the liverish bulge along the line of his jaw, trying to find a way to settle the mask over the bruise without chafing it too much, but he nodded and pushed through, more confidently and quickly than Namboze had. She had already moved on to the next plant and was fingering a spray of shark-mouthed flowers, or flower analogues. One of them snapped suddenly, Namboze only just withdrawing her fingers in time.

‘I didn’t imagine those insects I saw a while back,’ she commented, beckoning the physician over to her side. ‘Fly-traps don’t evolve unless there are flies to eat.’

Travertine was the next through. The ecology of this world, Chiku guessed, fascinated ver much less than the mere fact of being here. Geology had shaped Crucible, and biology had greened it, but physics had brought Travertine across twenty-eight light-years to stand on its surface. Ve stood apart from the other two, hands at vis side, as if in private communion with some force Chiku could not see.

Chiku was reluctant to break the moment.

‘You should go through,’ Arachne said.

So she joined them on the other side, and while she waited for the girl to join them, she reached down and scooped up a fistful of olive mulch and squeezed it until it bled moisture. She opened her hand and watched the smear of alien soil avalanche off her self-cleaning glove.

‘We should press on,’ Arachne said. ‘There’s an area of open ground a little way from here that’ll give us the best view.’

‘The best view of what, exactly?’ Dr Aziba asked, sweat already prickling his scalp. It was as hot and humid as Chiku had expected, and they had barely begun to move.

‘I took the liberty of repeating your transmission to the holoships, Chiku. That plus the demonstration of my capabilities appears to have had some effect at last. Malabar and Majuli have disengaged their slowdown engines, and the frequency of impactors has dropped sharply. I find both gestures encouraging.’

‘Will you allow them free passage?’ Namboze asked.

‘If they don’t make any more violent overtures.’

‘We can do better than that,’ Chiku said, picking her way through a tangle of python-thick roots. ‘Re-establish dialogue, negotiate terms for a full slowdown once they’ve passed through the system and out the other side. I won’t abandon them to interstellar space. Or Zanzibar, for that matter. We’ll find a way to bring the citizens back to the system, even if we have to do it a shuttle at a time.’

‘For the moment,’ Arachne said, ‘there’s a more pressing consideration.’

It took an hour of hard scrambling to reach the area of open ground Arachne had promised them. They had all tripped and fallen at least once, and Dr Aziba had ripped the fabric of his gloves as he tried to grab for something to arrest his fall. Fortunately, nothing had broken the surface of his skin before the self-suturing material healed itself invisibly. The mood remained tense, and they had little to say to each other on the trek, not even the two pairs of nominal allies. Chiku thought it must have been a peculiarly acute sort of torture for Namboze, being ushered through this world of wonders at quickstep. In spite of Arachne’s admonitions to keep moving, she kept stooping to examine things, like a dog that needed to sniff every third twig.

The clearing was not artificial, Arachne told them. The Providers found it when they first emerged from their seed packages, and it was at least several thousand years old, perhaps more. She thought some geological anomaly had prevented trees from establishing themselves. There were hundreds of similar features elsewhere in the forest.

The party cut through knee-deep undergrowth until they were perhaps a hundred metres into the clearing. There was a little more light here, since they were no longer under the canopy, but the overall illumination remained meagre. Their masks and backpacks and protective equipment glowed with tribal swatches of high-visibility colour, registering the dimness as the approach of night.

And then they saw overhead the phenomenon Arachne had brought them to witness.

They stared at it wordlessly, as if they lacked the visual grammar to interpret the patterns falling on their eyes. Nothing in their collective experience could have prepared them for what they were seeing.

Whatever it was, it was sitting right over them.

Chiku thought of weather systems. It was circular, like the eye of a storm, but it was much, much, too circular to be a weather system. It was a sharp black circumference, an orbit of darkness pushing down through the ash that looked as wide as the world.

‘Fifty kilometres across,’ Arachne said, as if Chiku’s mind were open for the reading. ‘Ten kilometres above us. That ash layer is a lot higher up than it looks.’

‘Tell us what we’re seeing,’ Travertine said, ‘although I think I can take a pretty good guess.’

‘The Watchkeepers,’ Chiku said, before Arachne had time to offer a reply. ‘Or one of them, anyway. That’s what we’re looking at, isn’t it – the lowest, narrowest part of one of those things, pushing down into the atmosphere?’

‘I told you about my concerns regarding their elevated state of alertness,’ Arachne said, ‘but I failed to anticipate this degree of intervention. As you say, Chiku, one of the twenty-two has descended from its normal elevation, matched its speed with Crucible’s surface and come to hover here. The bulk of it is still in space: all but the last hundred kilometres of its narrowest part remain in vacuum, and only the last ten kilometres protrude beneath the stratosphere – one-hundredth part of the Watch-keeper! The precision is quite impressive, would you agree?’

‘What does it want?’ asked Namboze.

‘Us, I suppose,’ Chiku said. They were standing in a loose formation, necks craned, turning slowly on their heels. ‘It knows we’re here, in this exact spot – or is it following you, Arachne, and we just happen to be in the same location? Does it even register us, or are we lost in the noise, just more biology it doesn’t really care about?’

‘It registers everything,’ Arachne said. ‘And yes, it has a particular and long-standing interest in me, as I’ve already explained. The Watchkeep-ers called me across space, after all. They sent me their message, and I answered – one machine-substrate consciousness responding to another. Since I arrived, however – as I’ve freely admitted – progress hasn’t exactly been… speedy.’

‘Someone’s piqued their curiosity, then,’ Travertine said.

‘Even they couldn’t ignore recent developments. An impactor was about to strike Mandala. My defences weren’t able to intercept it and I feared the worst. But the impactor vanished just before it touched Crucible’s atmosphere.’

‘Vanished?’ Chiku asked.