Alastair Reynolds - On the Steel Breeze

‘And this is relevant because?’

‘June Wing, we believe, has a line of contact with Lin Wei – or Arethusa, as she’s taken to calling herself. We would very much like to speak with Arethusa, our founder. But Arethusa won’t return our calls and June Wing isn’t exactly in a hurry to speak to us, either. But at least we know where June Wing is and what she’s doing. Now all we need is for someone June trusts to speak to her on our behalf. That’s where you come in.’

‘I should have listened to Geoffrey.’

‘And what did he tell you?’

‘Never have anything to do with merpeople.’

‘You expressed a similar sentiment to Kanu, and look what happened there. But tell me – from your many conversations with Geoffrey, what did he make of Arethusa?’

‘We had plenty of more important things to talk about – your founder wasn’t the first topic on everyone’s mind, you know.’

She thought of Geoffrey, the handful of times they had met. Of course they had spoken, and of course they had spoken of Arethusa, who had once been Lin Wei but was now something very far from a human woman. But all that was ancient history.

They had reached water at the base of the shaft. Without any fuss the flier went submersible, water lapping its windows. The clinics and hotels and boutiques carried on beneath the surface, except now they were airtight and lit up with neon. Other vehicles and swimmers moved through the water, outlined in glowing colour. There Chiku glimpsed nets and canopies of marine vegetation, darting shoals of electric-blue fish, astonishing pastel-coloured coral formations. Under swimmer supervision, a huge biomechanical monster, like a cross between a lobster and a squid, helped to position prefab building parts into place. Chiku surveyed its claws and tentacles with dread, imagining the damage it could do, but the swimmers appeared unconcerned by their docile helper.

‘A construction kraken,’ Mecufi said, as if the monster were the most mundane thing in the universe. ‘The same sort of animal that Kanu works with. They’re actually very agreeable creatures, once you get to know them.’

And then they were moving horizontally along a lit tunnel, into the great vaults of the false mountain.

‘We’ve established that the ghost is a message from your sibling on the holoship,’ Mecufi said. ‘Tell me about the other Chiku – Chiku Red, the one who never came back.’

‘What’s to tell?’

‘Humour me.’

Chiku sighed. ‘Eunice had a ship called Winter Queen. It was the one she’d used for all her expeditions around the solar system. Long before anyone else knew about the Chibesa Principle, she upgraded Winter Queen ’s engine, set the ship running and headed for interstellar space. She wasn’t expecting to get anywhere – it was a gesture, the throwing down of a gauntlet. Eventually they worked out where she was, how far out. But no one thought there was a hope in hell of catching up with her.’

‘Except for Chiku Red.’

‘There’d been some improvements in engine design that would allow a ship to reach Eunice and make it back, but everything still had to be cut to the bone – one passenger, the bare minimum of redundant systems, no backup if something went wrong. Sixty years just to reach Eunice, even longer to slow down, turn around and travel back.’

‘What exactly was the mission objective? To fetch Winter Queen – or your great-grandmother?’

‘It wasn’t about bringing her home. Her body, maybe. And any secrets she might have carried with her.’

‘Presumably she didn’t mean for those secrets to return to Earth.’

‘You didn’t know my great-grandmother. She presented her family with one set of challenges from beyond the grave. Maybe this was another. We were hoping for something.’

‘New physics, beyond even the Chibesa Principle?’

‘Who knows?’ Chiku shrugged, boring of this inquisition. ‘The only way to know was to get out there and look.’

‘And what became of Chiku Red?’

‘She never made it back. Her ship – Memphis – sent a message to say it was on final approach to Winter Queen and that it had initiated the wake-up procedure for Chiku Red. Then silence. That was the last anyone heard from her.’

‘Then your presumption is that she died out there?’

‘My great-grandmother was a twitchy old woman. She’d already installed defences on her space station and an iceteroid, to ward against casual intruders. Something similar must have taken out Chiku Red’s ship.’

‘Or communications simply failed.’

The vehicle was surfacing in a dome-shaped cave half-full of water. It had been a flier, then a submarine; now it effortlessly assumed the role of boat. As it approached a jetty, another door opened in its hull, this time in the side rather than the belly. Mecufi’s mobility exo reappeared, scooped him from his seat and took delicate charge of its passenger.

‘Chiku Red never came home.’

‘And if she had… how would that have changed things?’

They disembarked into moist warm air. Windows and balconies rose in overlapping circles to the dome’s apex. Suspended by invisible wires and limned by spotlights, the awesome skeleton of a plesiosaur loomed over the flier, its flippers frozen in the action of paddling air.

‘It’s time to stop playing games,’ Chiku said. ‘I’m an Akinya. We don’t like to be messed around.’

‘Once upon a time,’ Mecufi said as his exo carried him to the edge of the jetty, ‘there might have been some truth in that statement.’

At the jetty’s side, a translucent, ice-coloured boat with a swan’s neck and head bobbed on the waves created by the flier’s arrival. Mecufi slipped out of the exo into the water and vanished beneath the surface. He reappeared a few seconds later, his large dark eyes blinking, and he rubbed them with his hands. He was smiling, floating on his back like a sea otter, suddenly muscular and sleek.

‘What am I meant to do?’

‘Swim if you like – we’re not going far – but you may prefer to take the boat.’

Chiku opted for the boat. It was a two-seater affair with very rudimentary controls – the sort of craft available for hire by the hour at civic boating lakes. Mecufi swam ahead, the boat puppying after him. A water-filled channel beside the jetty took them out of the chamber, down branching corridors with walls of glowing green. They passed another swimmer, an elderly aquatic moving in the opposite direction, but Chiku’s was the only boat. She began to feel self-conscious, as if they had made special provisions for her clumsiness.

At length, they entered another chamber and Mecufi hauled himself onto a railed ledge that circled the wall at the water’s edge. Chiku’s boat bobbed to a halt, nodding its swan’s head as she climbed out. Suspended vertically from the ceiling was a spacecraft, like some improbably ornate chandelier.

Chiku’s jaw dropped as she realised exactly what she was looking at, but Mecufi spoke before she could.

‘Chiku Red did come home – this is her ship, Memphis. As you can see, it sustained considerable damage.’

Chiku said nothing for a few moments. It was too much to take in, too much to assess and consider. Nothing she had experienced in her long life had prepared her for this.

Slowly and calmly she said: ‘This is either a hoax, or an outrage.’

‘We spotted the ship on its way through the system and calculated that it was travelling too quickly to be captured by the sun’s gravitational field. We did you a favour and recovered it.’

‘You had no right to keep this from my family.’ Chiku tightened her grip on the rail, shivering with indignation. ‘Anyway, how do I know it’s authentic?’