On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was their eyes she saw first. Two pairs, hovering like binary stars. It took a second or so for her brain to make sense of the low, muscular forms to which the eyes were attached.

Panthers. She had no idea how she knew this, but her brain provided the information all by itself.

‘They can’t hurt us,’ she said.

‘Let us hope,’ Kwami said, ‘that their Mechanism inhibitory implants are still functioning.’ He closed his eyes, formulating a complex and deadly neural invocation. ‘I shall issue a kill command.’

He raised a hand, slowly, in the direction of the panthers and voked the mental instruction.

Chiku and Pedro did likewise. Every human knew how to do it, though few expected ever to put the knowledge into practice. Uncle Geoffrey, in one of their last conversations, had spoken of Memphis Chibesa killing a huge and belligerent bull elephant simply by willing it to death – dropping it like a sack of meat.

The panthers were still alive.

‘It is not functioning,’ Kwami said unnecessarily. ‘Either the Mech is too thin, or she has disabled the kill function, or these cats have always lived beyond Mech influence.’

‘Can they kill us?’ Pedro asked.

‘Left to their own devices,’ Kwami said, ‘they would not normally predate on humans, but it is well within their capabilities.’

Chiku dragged her eyes from the waiting cats and glanced in the other direction. If Pedro was right – and she was inclined to believe him – there was another one, at least, somewhere further down the corridor.

Cats. How clever of Arachne, she thought.

‘They’re not strong enough to break down the doors,’ Chiku said. ‘If we all get into one of these rooms, then block the door from the other side…’ But her mind was already running ahead, pointing out the foolishness of this plan. They could not stay here until the cats wandered away, not with the artilect moving around up there.

‘We must take our chances with the cats,’ Kwami said. ‘They may be beyond the Mech’s influence, but that does not automatically make them killers.’ And he threw up his arms and roared at the panthers, as if that might startle them into turning away.

It did not. Far from intimidating the panthers, his action only stirred them into motion. They began to advance down the stairs, side by side, black cat-shaped cut-outs moving through degrees of gloom. Their pupils were the only features in a head-sized void. It was as if their eyes moved on invisible rails, sliding along some geodesic curve of maximum feline stealth.

Chiku swallowed. The cats clearly would not let them pass without a fight. ‘Perhaps there’s something in the other rooms that we can use against them,’ she said. ‘Maybe we can ching into those robots, use them for cover—’

Kwami had interposed himself between Chiku, Pedro and the panthers. He still had his arms raised and was repeating, over and over: ‘Stop. Go away, now. Stop. Go away now,’ as the cats slinked towards him.

‘Imris!’ Chiku said. ‘Don’t provoke them. Mecufi must be on his way by now.’

Pedro grabbed at her sleeve. ‘We can’t help him.’

They progressed down the corridor, Pedro facing into its depths, Chiku unable to tear her gaze from Kwami. The cats were nearly upon him now. He had lowered both hands almost to the horizontal and was still muttering, but she could not hear the words now. Amazingly, whatever he was saying or doing appeared to be having some effect. The cats were still advancing, but were now flattening their bodies towards the floor as if in submission. The two dark shapes had coalesced into a single moving form, a clot of blackness with four hovering eyes.

The other cat – if there was another cat – still had not shown itself. Chiku glanced through an open door as she passed. A billiard table with stiff wooden cues racked on the wall next to it. They could climb on that table and use the billiard cues against the cats, if all else failed. But she still hadn’t reached the door she was aiming for.

She glanced back at Kwami. The cats had stopped at his feet, hunched down so low to the ground that from a distance they could have been pelts.

‘Imris…’ she called after him.

He began to turn his head. ‘I think—’ he started.

The black forms sprang, fast and almost silently, like a conjuring trick – two black pelts pulled into the air on hidden threads and dropped onto Kwami like a pair of smothering cloaks. He fell to his knees and the cats swallowed him in their darkness. Chiku heard no scream, not even a groan. The only sounds came from the cats.

She finally registered that she was staring at a man being mauled to death by panthers.

‘Come on,’ Pedro hissed.

‘We have to help him!’ Chiku said, moving to return to Kwami.

One cat let out a fierce yelp followed by a sharp snakelike hiss. The black form pulled away from Kwami and the cats became two again. One of them was on the ground, on its side. The other crouched back from Kwami, snarling, uncertain whether to retreat or resume the mauling.

Chiku caught a glint of metal in Kwami’s hand.

The cat still standing backed further away. The other was dead or in the process of dying, its blood a spreading extension of its own blackness.

Kwami had a knife all along, Chiku registered. The little gleaming blade was not much longer than her finger. The knife fell from his grip and rolled onto the floor. Chiku grabbed it and stabbed in the direction of the retreating panther, making her own hiss. The panther continued to back away. It was bleeding from between its forelegs, but the wound did not look fatal, so far as she could tell.

‘Imris.’ She knelt by him, glancing rapidly between the cat and the injured man. ‘Imris. Talk to me.’

She could hardly see his face, it was so covered with blood. She decided, for a moment, that Kwami was already dead. But then his eyes flashed in the darkness and he managed to speak.

‘I am hurt. The cats were on me before I could do much with the knife.’

‘Are you in pain?’

‘No. I have turned off the pain. But I do not feel strong. I fear I am bleeding quite badly.’

‘We’ll get help. It won’t take long for a scrambulance—’

‘You forget, Chiku, that we cannot trust the Mechanism. I have already voked the necessary request for medical assistance but have received no confirmation that my call has been logged.’

‘I’ll go outside and call again. The Mech’ll be stronger—’

‘It is still much too dangerous to go above ground. You must take care of yourselves now. You came here for a reason – do not lose sight of the bigger concern.’

She glanced at the other cat, which had still not made up its mind whether to remain or go. ‘I won’t leave you here, on your own.’

‘Young miss, it is imperative that you do so. In time, I am confident that some sort of intervention will arrive – one cannot shoot down a spaceship in the Surveilled World and not have someone notice. But until the household is safe, you must think of yourselves. Go now! If you would return my knife, I shall do my best to deter the other cat.’

‘Imris—’ she began.

‘Go,’ he whispered.

She handed him the knife. The other cat eyed her. She backed away.

‘Come on,’ Pedro hissed from the doorway of the billiards room.

‘The right room’s down this way,’ she said.

Pedro dived into the billiard room and grabbed cues from their rack, four of them in one go. He passed two to Chiku. ‘If the cat attacks,’ he said, ‘go for its eyes. Only its head and eyes. Nothing else is will hurt it.’

She held a cue in each hand, like ski sticks. They were not going to help, she thought. The cat would paw aside this joke of a defence in a heartbeat. Better to swipe hard, maybe, and hope to club the life out of it? It was strange how the myriad puzzles of her life had thinned down to this single little question: how best to murder a cat with a piece of wood.

Something flashed and roared further along the corridor, in the direction they were about to head. Not a panther’s roar, Chiku thought as she blinked the blinding light away. She caught an after-image framed in the corridor’s perspectives: a figure too thin to be human holding something that looked like a stick.

The figure said, ‘This way – quickly.’

The blast had given the panther still crouching near Kwami the encouragement it needed to leave. Another roar, another flash, and Chiku got a better view of the stick-figure. It was a proxy, identical to the ones they had seen earlier. It was holding a clumsy-looking sort of weapon made of wood and finely patterned metal.

‘Quickly,’ the figure urged again.

She knew the proxy’s voice. ‘Lin – is that you?’

‘This way. Now!’

The proxy opened one of the doors, and instead of darkness beyond there was a red glow – the only artificial light Chiku had seen since they entered the building. It could only be the room she was looking for.

‘What took you so long?’ Chiku demanded breathlessly as she and Pedro made their way towards the light.

‘I’ve only just managed to squeeze enough of myself through the blinds and feints she’s erected in the Mechanism. This proxy is running autonomously – Arachne’s interference would impede direct control of it even if there was no time lag to consider. I’d like to keep my actual whereabouts hidden, though, so let’s discuss the details later.’

The proxy ushered them into the red room and closed the door behind them. It put down the weapon, which Chiku now saw was an antique rifle. ‘Elephant gun,’ it explained. ‘I found it, loaded and ready, in one of these rooms. A gross violation of every civilised law against the ownership of firearms, but you Akinyas always did love your blood sports.’

‘Imris is hurt,’ Chiku said, so short of breath that she struggled to get the words out.

‘I saw. I’ll try to summon medical assistance at the earliest opportunity, or failing that, do what I can for him myself.’

‘Wait,’ Pedro said, pinching sweat of out his eyes. ‘I still don’t get it. Why are you here? If you wanted to help, why didn’t you just come with us in the first place?’

Something scratched against the door. The proxy maintained a resolute grip on the handle. ‘Let’s just say that I wished to keep my involvement to the minimum, especially given the time and energy I have expended in not bringing myself to Arachne’s attention. Nonetheless, I was curious about what you’d find here. I also suspected you might run into difficulties.’

‘Is this the place?’ Chiku asked.

‘Yes. There’s another room through that door behind you. The wall is already displaying a preliminary integration of the complete Crucible data set. When you are present, it’ll achieve maximum resolution.’

‘How do we get out of here?’ Chiku asked.

‘Leave that to me.’

She was out of options. She passed through the connecting door into a slightly larger windowless subterranean room The proxy held back, securing the outer door.

One whole wall was filled with an image of Crucible so sharp and real she felt as if she was standing in space, in a room with only three walls, looking out through the absent fourth. The brightness affronted her eyes. It was a familiar image by now, from the Earthlike colours and contours of the world itself and the alien disfigurement of Mandala – but not so alien after a thousand viewings – to the cyclonic and anticyclonic cloud patterns, nature’s hand guided by laws of chemistry and physics that held currency from here to the edge of the universe. Coriolis forces, triple points, time and tide.

She became aware of Pedro standing next to her.

After a silence, he said, ‘What are those things around Crucible?’

‘I don’t know. In the doctored data, there was nothing around the planet. Arethusa saw… areas, volumes, where something had been processed out of the data stream. This is what Arachne was actually hiding.’

‘They’re in orbit.’

‘Yes – or in space, anyway, floating around the planet. I don’t think we should make too many assumptions right now. It’s not our job to make sense of it, just to get it to the right people.’

‘The right people being… you. Chiku Green.’

‘Apparently,’ she said, suddenly overwhelmed by a bleak and fatalistic certainty. ‘I had my doubts, but I’m more certain of that now than ever. This can’t be made public, not yet. Not here or in the holoships. It’s too much. It would rip us all apart.’

‘Those things are huge. No, huge isn’t a big enough word. The holoships are huge. Those things are like chunks of a planet. They must be hundreds, thousands of kilometres across.’

‘Easily.’

‘And we’re sure the Providers didn’t make them?’

She nodded. ‘Present when Crucible made the first detection. And something about that detection, something Arachne saw, made her – it – hide these things. But not Mandala. She concealed one piece of alien intelligence, but not another.’

‘She must have had a reason.’

‘Tell me what you see,’ said Lin Wei’s proxy from the other room.

‘Things, structures, orbiting Crucible. They’re huge and very dark – they only show up against the dayside. They’re like pine-cones, with the sharp end pointed down at the surface.’

‘Numbers?’

‘Hard to tell from this one image. Twenty, maybe more. I’d say they’re a few thousand kilometres above Crucible. And big – several hundreds of kilometres from end to end, easily. Maybe a thousand, give or take. They’re definitely not natural. The pine-cone structure – it’s very geometric, very regular. There are some lights or something shining out between the overlapping parts. Mostly, though, they’re just dark. I suppose they must be ships, or stations… gathered around Crucible… the way the holoships are supposed to when they arrive.’

‘Do you see any connection, physical or symbolic, between the orbiting forms – we’ll assume they’re orbiting – and the Mandala structure?’

‘No… I mean, nothing obvious. Not that I’m an expert in this kind of thing, you know?’ But after a moment, Chiku added: ‘Oh, wait.’

‘Yes?’

‘The image is moving – I hadn’t realised that until now. The angle of view is changing, very slowly.’

‘It can’t be a real-time grab – there just isn’t the bandwidth, especially after Arachne doctored the data. You must be seeing some kind of phase-averaged summation compiled over many orbital and seasonal cycles.’

‘Our viewpoint appears to be locked over Mandala – it’s just the objects that are moving. We’re in the same orbital plane as them. One of them is sliding right under me, showing me its blunt end, pointing back into space. The overlapping plates start at the back and work their way towards the sharp end. It looks half-engineered, half-grown. It’s definitely nothing humans could make – not now, not in centuries. The holoships, they’re just pieces of leftover rock we’ve turned into ships. These are colossal. And there’s something in the middle of the blunt end, like an engine nozzle – except I don’t think it’s that. I’m looking down it now. There’s a light, very bright, shining out of the back – I couldn’t see it at all until now. Yes, very bright – it’s blue… I don’t suppose it’s an engine, not if the objects are already in orbit.’

‘There will be more analysis. When I have something to report, you’ll be the first to know.’

‘You said there was a way out of here.’

‘Move to the right wall. It’s subdivided – press the middle panel, it should spring open onto a staircase. The wall will seal behind you as you descend. The rest you’ll work out for yourself.’

Chiku did as Lin instructed, puzzled and fearful even as the wall sprung aside as promised. Red lighting traced a steeply descending metal staircase.

‘Down there?’

‘Down there. Be quick, now.’

Chiku and Pedro went down the metal stairs. They had the spartan, clattery feel of something bolted together in a hurry. ‘Thank you, Lin,’ Chiku called as the wall whisked shut again, and they were alone in the red-lit shaft.

The stairs continued down a long shaft bored through solid rock. Every fifty or so steps there was a small metal landing at which the stairs reversed direction and resumed their descent.

‘What’s under here?’ Pedro wondered.

‘My family built this thing called the blowpipe. It’s basically a big tunnel that goes all the way under the household, out to Kilimanjaro and up the inside of the mountain. They used it to shoot things into space.’

‘I see.’ The absence of enthusiasm in his voice accurately mirrored her own apprehension. ‘And when you say “shoot things into space”—’

‘I think people could use it, if there was an emergency.’

‘Maybe Lin just meant for us to use the tunnel itself as an escape route.’

‘In which case we’d need about five days’ marching rations. And spacesuits.’

They had descended a good hundred metres, Chiku estimated, when they reached the bottom of the stairs. They were deep into the cool, dark African bedrock, the day’s heat and brightness a memory far overhead. The stairs had brought them into a large room through which the metal tube of the blowpipe passed from one wall to the other.

Chiku explained to Pedro that the blowpipe did not begin here, within the household, but somewhere hundreds of kilometres to the east, in an Akinya-owned transhipment facility that had probably long been mothballed. At that location, cargo and passengers – mostly cargo – were loaded into the blowpipe’s capsule-like packages, ready to be catapulted into space.

But to Chiku’s surprise, Eunice or her children, perhaps, had made provision for a quick getaway. Next to the horizontal shaft of the blowpipe was a heavy mechanical rack containing three launch capsules, each a rounded bullet barely larger than a cryogenic casket. There was also a complicated thickening in the pipe, some kind of valve and airlock device, Chiku presumed, with a door that looked about the right size to admit one of the capsules.

‘This is insane,’ Pedro said. ‘When was the last time anyone used one of these things?’

‘There’s power. No reason for it not to work just because it hasn’t been operated in a long while.’ Chiku climbed onto a little walkway that brought her up to the level of the racked capsules. She looked inside the unit closest to the blowpipe and studied the thickly padded interior, working out where her feet and head would go.

‘It’s only big enough for one,’ Pedro said, clambering onto the platform next to her.

‘Looks that way – but there are three capsules.’

‘Do you have the faintest idea how to use one of these things?’

‘Let’s just hope that’ll take care of itself, shall we?’ She planted her hands on her hips and inhaled deeply. ‘OK – how do we do this? Draw straws?’

‘Because that worked out really well on Venus, didn’t it? No, no straws.’

‘I agree.’

‘But what’s in your head is more important than what’s in mine, so I think you should go first. On the other hand, it’s an untested system, so maybe I should go first instead.’

‘And while we’re debating, the artilect might be about to smash the house to rubble and cut our power. I’ll take the first capsule. After that, we’ll just have to wing it.’

‘These things go into orbit, right?’

‘Yes, so let’s hope Mecufi’s up there waiting to rescue us. He must be monitoring us by now. Surely he knows we’re in trouble.’

Pedro kissed her. ‘Get in. We’ll be fine. I’ll be right behind you.’

‘See you on the other side.’

‘Yes, you will.’ And he kissed her again, then gently encouraged her into the capsule. As soon as the lid closed, the already snug interior became even snugger as the padding sensed her intrusion and began to conform to her precise body shape, becoming a Chiku-shaped mould. She could hardly move once it had finished oozing into place around her. Her face was clear, though, and in front of her was a small glowing panel filled with text and status diagrams, updating rapidly.

A soft female voice said in Swahili: ‘Checkout complete. Vacuum integrity verified. Projected airspace clear. All magnetic and optical systems at nominal readiness. Launch authority enabled. Awaiting go command.’

‘Launch me,’ Chiku said.

‘Launch sequence initiated. Please stand by for induction tube insertion.’

She barely felt the shove through the padding as the capsule slid sideways, into the valve/airlock mechanism. She felt like a jacketed round being chambered in a rifle.

‘Launch spoolback commencing. Spoolback will terminate in ninety seconds and may be overridden at any point. Maximum spoolback acceleration: five gees. Maximum forward launch acceleration: ten sustained, two hundred momentary.’

She understood – or thought she did, at any rate. She was being shuttled back to the start of the blowpipe to give the capsule the full run of the tube to build up its speed. On the display hovering before her face, a green digit climbed up to five gees and stayed there. Cocooned in the protective padding, the acceleration was easily bearable.

But ninety seconds was a hellishly long time. She thought of Pedro, waiting back there on his own. Presumably the system would not allow his capsule into the blowpipe until hers was already clear and on its way to orbit. The spoolback was taking too much time, she decided, and the capsule did not need it to reach launch velocity.

‘Override. Abort spoolback.’

‘Continue launch sequence?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was dry, barely comprehensible. ‘Yes. Do it.’

‘Decelerating. All safe-load ceilings now suspended. Forward acceleration will exceed recommended physiological tolerances. Launch may be aborted until alpha threshold. Maximum induction will be applied in five seconds. Four… three…’

She closed her eyes, as if that would make a difference.

Acceleration hit hard, like a monstrous metal piston slamming into the back of the capsule, ramming it forwards. For a terrifying instant, she thought nothing in the universe could apply or endure so much force.

Yet somehow she remained conscious. Through blurred, tunnel-constricted vision she saw the acceleration digit rise to ten… eleven… twelve and finally level out around thirteen gees. But she knew this was the smooth part of the ride. Ahead, the induction tube curved to thread through the stone bowels of Kilimanjaro. She had heard that was the tough part – a transitional moment of hundreds of gees as the capsule made the swerve.

‘Alpha threshold in twenty seconds. No abort possible after alpha threshold… Alpha threshold in ten seconds… Alpha threshold passed. No abort now possible. Nominal launch sequence proceeding. Prepare for transient load.’

She prepared, if that was the word, by clearing her thoughts. She would lose consciousness during the swerve as the blood was squeezed from her brain like water out of a sponge, curtailing every thought until it flooded back in again when the capsule decelerated. In an eyeblink she would be rising through Kilimanjaro, then shot into rarefied atmosphere as launch lasers stationed around the summit provided her remaining escape velocity.

As she felt her consciousness fading, she wondered how much she would remember, when it was all over.