Reynolds, Alastair: Redemption Ark

But there was no ground below. Though the landing site it had selected was close to the target archipelago where the first camps had already been sited, the ship was lowering itself towards the sea.

My God, Clavain thought. Suddenly he understood why the ship had remade itself. It—or whatever part of the Captain remained in charge—must have had this descent in mind from the moment the nature of the watery planet became clear. It had flattened the spike of its tail to allow itself to rest on the seabed. Down below, the sea began to boil away under the assault of the drive flames. The ship descended through mountains of steam, billowing tens of kilometres into the stratosphere. The sea was a kilometre deep under the touchdown point, for the bed sloped sharply away from the archipelago’s edge. But that kilometre hardly mattered. When Clavain felt the ship keel, coming to rest with a tremendous deep groan, most of it was still above the surface of the roiling waves.

On a nameless waterlogged world on the ragged edge of human space, under dual suns, Nostalgia for Infinity had landed.

EPILOGUE

For days after the landing the hull creaked and echoed from the lower depths as it adjusted to the external pressure of the ocean. Now and then, without human bidding, servitors scurried into the bilges to repair hull leaks where the seawater was surging in. The ship rocked ominously from time to time, but gradually anchored itself until it began to feel less like a temporary addition to the landscape than a weirdly hollowed-out geological feature: a sliver-thin stack of morbidly weathered pumice or obsidian; an ancient natural sea-tower wormed with man-made tunnels and caverns. Overhead, silver-grey clouds only occasionally ripped apart to reveal pastel-blue skies.

It was a week before anyone left the ship. For days, shuttles wheeled around it, circling it like nervous seabirds. Although not all the docking bays had been submerged, no one was yet willing to attempt a landing. Contact was however reestablished with the teams who had already landed on the Juggler world, and who had made the descent from the surface. Makeshift boats were sent across the water from the nearest island—a distance of fifteen kilometres only—until they kissed against the sheer-sided cliff of the ship. Depending on tidal conditions it was possible to reach a small human-only airlock.

Clavain and Felka were in the first boat to make it back to the island. They said nothing during the crossing as they slid through wet grey mist. Clavain felt cold and despondent as he watched the black wall of the ship fall back into the fog. The sea here was soup-thick with floating micro-organisms—they were on the very fringes of a major Juggler biomass focus—and the organisms had already begun to plaster themselves against the side of the ship above the waterline. There was a scabby green accretion, a little like verdigris, which made the ship look like it had been here for centuries. He wondered what would happen if they could not persuade Nostalgia for Infinity to take off again. They had twenty years to talk it into leaving, but if the ship had already made up its mind that it wanted to stay rooted here, he doubted very much that they would be able to persuade it otherwise. Perhaps it wanted a final resting place, where it could become a memorial to its crime and the redemptive act that had followed.

“Clavain . . .” Felka said.

He looked at her. “I’m all right.”

“You look tired. But we need you, Clavain. We haven’t even begun the struggle yet. Don’t you understand? All that’s happened so far is only the beginning. We have the weapons now . . .”

“A handful of them. And Skade still wants them.”

“Then she’ll have to fight us for them, won’t she? She won’t find that as easy as she imagines.”

Clavain looked back, but the ship was hidden. “If we’re still here, there won’t be a lot we can do to stop her.”

“We’ll have the weapons themselves. But Remontoire will have returned by then, I’m sure of it. And he’ll have Zodiacal Light with him. The damage wasn’t fatal; a ship like that can repair itself.”

Clavain tightened his lips and agreed. “I suppose so.”

She held his hand as if to warm it. “What’s wrong, Clavain? You brought us so far. We followed you. You can’t give up now.”

“I’m not giving up,” he said. “I’m just . . . tired. It’s time to let someone else carry on the fight. I’ve been a soldier too long, Felka.”

“Then become something else.”

“That’s not quite what I meant.” He tried to force some cheer into his voice. “Look, I’m not going to die tomorrow, or next week. I owe it to everyone to get this settlement off the ground. I just don’t think I’ll necessarily be here when Remontoire makes it back. But who knows? Time has a nasty way of surprising me. God knows I’ve learned that often enough.”

They continued in silence. The crossing was choppy, and now and then the boat had to steer itself past huge seaweedlike concentrations of ropy biomass, which shifted and reacted to the boat’s presence in an unnervingly purposeful way. Presently Clavain sighted land, and shortly after that the boat skidded to a halt in a few feet of water, bottoming out on rock.

They had to get out and wade the rest of the way to dry land. Clavain was shivering by the time he squelched out of the last inch of water. The boat looked a long way away, and Nostalgia for Infinity was nowhere to be seen at all.

Antoinette Bax came to meet them, picking her way carefully across a field of rockpools that gleamed like a tessellation of perfect grey mirrors. Behind her, on a higher rising slope of land, was the first encampment: a hamlet of bubbletents stapled into rock.

Clavain wondered how it would look in twenty years.

More than one hundred and sixty thousand people were aboard Nostalgia for Infinity, far too many to place on one island. There would be a chain of settlements, instead—as many as fifty, with a few hubs on the larger, drier nubs of land. Once those settlements were established, work could begin on the floating colonies that would provide long-term shelter. There would be enough work here to keep anyone busy. He felt an obligation to be part of it, but no sense that it was anything he had been born to do.

He felt, in fact, that he had done what he was born to do.

“Antoinette,” he said, knowing that Felka would not have recognised the woman without his help, “how are things on dry land?”

“There’s shit brewing already, Clavain.”

He kept his eyes on the ground, for fear of tripping. “Do tell.”

“A lot of people aren’t happy with the idea of staying here. They bought into Thorn’s exodus because they wanted to go home, back to Yellowstone. Being stuck on an uninhabited piss-ball for twenty years wasn’t quite what they had in mind.”

Clavain nodded patiently. He steadied himself against Felka, using her as a walking stick. “And did you impress on these people the fact that they’d be dead if they hadn’t come with us?”

“Yes, but you know what it’s like. No pleasing some people, is there?” She shrugged. “Well, just thought I’d cheer you up with that, in case you thought it was all going to be plain sailing from now on.”

“For some reason, that thought never crossed my mind. Now, can someone show us around the island?”

Felka helped him pick his way on to smoother ground. “Antoinette, we’re cold and wet. Is there somewhere we can get warm and dry?”

“Just follow me. We’ve even got tea on the go.”

“Tea?” Felka asked suspiciously.

“Seaweed tea. Local. But don’t worry. No one’s died of it yet, and you do eventually get used to the taste.”