Alastair Reynolds: On the Steel Breeze

‘I have direct access to her Mechanism neuromachinery. The Mechanism can incapacitate, and the Mechanism can euthanise. Do you understand me?’

‘It is Chiku Yellow you need to convince, not me.’

The mote eased free. Chiku Yellow’s fingers held it in a delicate pincer. Chiku Red had never crushed a mote but she had some idea of the force required. Mecufi would have made this mote a little less prone to accidental damage, but it would not be impossibly strong. The arc of her sister’s fingers began to quiver, like a twig under compression.

‘Tell her to stop resisting me.’

‘What are you going to do? You cannot take it away. You are not even here!’

‘The sea is here.’

She saw, then, what Arachne intended. If she made Chiku hurl the mote into the water beyond the Monument to the Discoveries, it would be lost in the waves for ever. Accidental damage would not activate it properly, and while there might be a protocol for recovering lost motes, Chiku felt sure that Mecufi’s example would have been engineered to be untraceable. Arachne would lose any possibility of studying the mote, but she would also place it beyond effective use.

Chiku Yellow made a dry clucking sound. She was trying to speak.

‘Stop,’ Chiku Red ordered, as if Arachne might care.

Chiku Yellow, the mote still between her fingers, was forced to walk to the edge of the Monument. Her arm angled out, the hand rotating so that the mote was uppermost, cradled beneath the sky.

Chiku Red sprang to her sister. Chiku Yellow swept out her right arm and the exo-supported limb knocked the wind from Chiku Red. Chiku Red stumbled to the floor, knees crunching onto stone. She let out a cry, gasped in a breath and forced herself back to her feet.

Chiku Yellow’s left arm was angling out over the edge of the balustrade. Her entire forearm and hand were now in a constant palsy. Chiku Red returned to her sister, this time anticipating the right arm. She was quicker now, and much less mindful of her own safety. She cupped both of her own hands around Chiku Yellow’s outstretched left hand and began to squeeze. The arm jerked violently. Chiku Yellow’s whole body was trying to swing away, the exo whining as it detected conflicting signals. Chiku Red could feel the hard sphere of the mote between her fingers and Chiku Yellow’s. She squeezed harder.

Chiku Yellow’s face was next to her own. It was her own face but older, a version of herself that had lived through much more time. Arachne’s hold on Chiku Yellow was still strong, but Chiku Yellow was trying to say something. Her eyes were wide and frightened, but for an instant they were her sister’s eyes, and she was there, and the word she was trying to say was yes.

Permission.

So Chiku Red did what needed to be done.

Later, much later, there was another drum-roll of thunder. This time it arrived out of an almost clear sky, and the progenitor of the thunder was not lightning but the movement of a small blunt thing cleaving through layers of air that rather resented being ripped apart at supersonic speed. Chiku raised a hand to shield her brow from the sun, squinting until the little craft snapped into sharper focus. It was white on the top, black on the belly, and it had flung out stubby, Dumbo-like wings for aerodynamic control. It was banking now, executing a series of spirals to shed the last vestiges of its orbital insertion velocity. Compared to the speeds it had attained before its arrival around Crucible, the heady fractions of the speed of light, this last little succession of hairpins barely counted as movement at all. But calamity was still just as possible, even in this terminal phase of the expedition.

Atmospheres, as Eunice Akinya had once declared, were a bitch. They gave no quarter.

The sixteen human survivors on the surface of Crucible had been monitoring the shuttle’s final approach for many days. They had witnessed the late stages of its breaking phase as it rode the brilliant flame of its PCP engine, and they had been in contact with the vehicle and its crew as it drew nearer to Crucible. This far, at least, things had gone well. The shuttle had homed in on its landing zone without incident and all technical systems were working normally. The sea was auspiciously calm. Where the algal load was highest, it was swamp-green and as thick and slow-moving as clotting blood.

Chiku and her fellow first settlers had agreed that the Providers should begin construction of the first city at one of the coastal locations. This was not the land mass on which Mandala lay, but the archipelago to the east. It would serve, though, until the colonists had gained a secure footing. For now, accommodations were spartan. The Providers had begun to create a harbour, but at the moment it was little more than a chain of rubble and boulders arcing out into the bay. Arachne’s machines moved like huge strutting birds, picking their way through shallows and along the shore as they progressed with their earth-moving labours. It was mesmerising to watch them, and at times a little unnerving. They were gigantic, but they had to be. They had a century’s worth of construction to catch up on.

Chiku and the little reception party stood on a shelf of flattened rock connected to the ground below by a zigzag of stairs fused directly into rock. The machines had provided a balustrade and a number of stone chairs and tables. Surveying the proceedings from this vantage point, Chiku felt as if she had been placed in a scene of deliberate timelessness, as if the vessel they were here to greet had come not from the stars, but from the orient, or somewhere beyond the narrow knowledge of Earth’s first mariners. She thought of the compass rose in Belém, the marble argosies and sea-monsters drawn on the map of the known world. But the impression of timelessness crumbled as soon as it washed over her. The human members of the welcoming party all wore atmospheric breather masks, for a start, and the girl with them was merely the immediate physical manifestation of a machine-substrate consciousness. Four of the humans had been awake when they arrived on this world, but the other twelve had only lately been brought out of skipover. There had been some interesting explaining to do when they awoke.

‘Airbrakes,’ Travertine said, directing Chiku’s attention to the movable surfaces sprouting from the shuttle’s wings and hull, plumping it up like a chick. ‘And now drogue chutes and main chutes, I hope. This is how we’d have come in, if we hadn’t had our wings clipped.’

‘It looks quite small,’ Namboze said.

‘It is,’ Chiku answered. ‘Only about a quarter the size of Icebreaker. But they did well just to build this one shuttle. We’ll have to put it on a plinth or something, when we’re certain we don’t need it any more. That might be a while off, though.’

The current tentative plan was to refuel the shuttle for one or more round-trip voyages to Zanzibar. Arachne had the means to make the fuel and her rockets could lift the vehicle back into orbit before the PCP engine was re-lit. But a lot would depend on how well it had endured this first crossing.

They would find a solution, one way or another.

The shuttle popped its parachutes, and for a moment, it hung impossibly in one spot over the ocean. It was a trick of vision, for the shuttle was still travelling quite quickly. When its belly kissed the water, it threw off two butterfly wings of green-stained spray. The shuttle surged and stopped, and then rocked on the swell. Sluggish waves oozed away from it.

It looked tiny, bobbing out there on the vast ocean.

Four Providers tasked to bring the vehicle to shore waded out on their strutting crane-like legs, and Chiku tracked the seabed’s gentle declivity by the water rising up their metal flanks. The crew remained inside the shuttle, as instructed, but Chiku could imagine their apprehension well enough. They had been in contact with the humans on the surface, but no assurances could have silenced their deepest qualms. They had witnessed terrible things being done to Crucible, and they had seen an equally terrible reprisal. They had no absolute proof that Chiku and her companions had survived the first expedition. Transmissions could have been faked, lies perpetuated. It was entirely possible that these towering robots were about to pick their ship apart like a meaty carcass.