Poseidon's Wake (4 page)

‘Sixty minutes and counting,’ Lucien said. The youngest member of the diplomatic team by a margin of decades, ve represented the Consolidation – a coalition of political and economic interests which essentially included everything in the solar system beyond the old power structures of the Earth and the Moon.

‘Fifty-six minutes,’ Swift said, almost apologetically. ‘I am sorry to insist on a point of diplomacy, but the agreed time began the moment your skids touched our soil.’

They made a beeline for the side of the wreck – a shadowed slab, dense with machinery. The side where the entrance point had been identified curved back over their heads. Kanu had the dizzy sensation that it was in a constant slow topple, about to bury the ambassadorial party.

‘That lock is tiny!’ Dalal said.

‘Emergency egress only,’ Lucien said. ‘The cargo locks are buried, or much too high up for us to reach in the time we have.’

Even the emergency lock was some distance above their heads, and they had to scramble up to it one at a time using pipes and handholds projecting from the wrecked hull. There was a narrow ledge beneath the lock and extending to one side of it. Korsakov was the first to reach the ledge, its width just taking his feet. He traversed sideways, one hand reaching to his left, the other hanging on to a rail over his head.

Dalal and Lucien went next, and then Kanu. Swift monkeyed up alongside them with dismaying agility, pausing only to scuff dust from the collar of his coat.

‘Lock power is still active,’ Korsakov announced. ‘I am going to try and open it.’ Continuing to brace himself with his right hand, he folded aside an armoured panel to access a bank of controls.

‘Well?’ Lucien asked.

‘Cycling,’ Korsakov said. ‘But this is, as Dalal said, a very small lock. I doubt it will hold more than one of us at a time.’

‘We’ll see you on the other side,’ Kanu said. ‘It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.’

‘Under the terms of our arrangement,’ Swift said, ‘I must not be the last to enter.’

‘We weren’t about to forget you,’ Lucien muttered.

Korsakov was soon inside the lock with the outer door sealed and the chamber pressurising. His voice sounded as clear as before. ‘The lock is reaching normal pressure. I will not, of course, be so foolish as to remove my helmet, and I advise the rest of you to follow my example.’

‘Tell us when the inner door opens,’ Dalal said.

‘It is doing just that, Garudi. I am stepping through into the ship. There is heat and power and emergency lighting, but no immediate sign of life.’

‘Garudi is next, then Lucien,’ Kanu said. ‘I’ll allow Swift to enter before me. Is that arrangement acceptable to all parties?’

There was no dissent, and so Dalal cycled through the lock next. She joined Korsakov on the other side, confirming his initial observations. ‘Much less structural damage than I was expecting. Everything looks straight and there’s still power, as Yevgeny says. The lower levels must have absorbed a lot of the impact.’

‘Bad news for anyone down there,’ Lucien said.

Kanu waited for the Consolidation ambassador to pass through the lock. Save for himself, the breathing members of the party were now all inside the wreck. It was just Kanu and the robot, alone under the sky of Mars.

‘Now your turn,’ he told Swift.

‘Thank you, Kanu. It’s rather irksome that I must use the lock in the first place, but there’s no avoiding it.’

‘When robots build ships, you can show us how it’s done.’

‘We shan’t build ships, Kanu. We shall become them.’

He waited on the ledge until Swift had gone through, and then counted the long seconds until the lock was ready to admit him. He cursed himself for forgetting to zero his suit clock the moment they landed on Mars.

‘How long have we been here?’ he asked Dalal when he finally joined the others.

‘Thirteen minutes just to get this far. And we’ll need to allow the same amount of time to get out.’

Kanu nodded within his helmet. Panels and signs were still aglow, and dim yellow service lighting offered glimpses into adjoining passageways and compartments.

‘We’ll never sweep the whole thing,’ he said, ‘so we won’t try. For a start, I think we can rule out survivors in the lower levels. But we should be able to reach the control core easily enough.’

‘It would be unwise to raise your hopes,’ Lucien said.

‘I’m not.’

‘Regardless, Kanu is correct,’ Dalal said. ‘For the sake of making our governments look good, we must go through the motions.’

‘Steady with talk like that,’ Kanu said. ‘They’ll hang you for honesty.’

Dalal grinned back at him through her faceplate. ‘Being hanged is the least of my present worries.’

The slope of the floor made progress tricky, but they found their way to the central trunk elevator without too much trouble.

Korsakov found the control panel and punched the big manual button to summon their ride. It came rattling and groaning along its shaft, squealing and protesting. Kanu supposed that they were lucky the elevator was working at all, after the impact the craft had sustained. But he would have welcomed any excuse to abandon the search and return to the flier.

The ambassadors entered the elevator, followed by Swift, and the car began to ascend, bucking and jerking as it hit some obstruction.

‘It is not easy to see what these Reclamationists were hoping to achieve,’ Swift said, as if he felt an obligation to make conversation.

‘It might be a symbolic gesture,’ Kanu said. ‘Reclaiming a piece of Mars, if only for a few days.’

‘With their corpses?’ Swift asked.

‘Maybe they hoped to survive long enough to issue some kind of statement, a declaration of sovereignty or suchlike.’

‘I still fail to see the logic. What use is this dry, airless world to you?’

‘No practical use at all,’ Kanu said as the elevator halted and the doors opened. ‘But we can’t bear the thought of someone else having it.’

The control deck was a semicircular room with passages branching off it and a wide armoured window occupying one arc of the curved wall. Some of the console displays were still active, and Korsakov was confident enough to start flipping the heavy manual control switches. With a clunk and whine, the window’s armoured shuttering began to retract.

They were higher on Mars now than when they landed, a good twenty levels up, and from this elevation – surveying the oddly tilted landscape – Kanu could easily make out the luminous, pastel-shaded anthills of three distant robot cities. Even closer, one of their connecting tentacles formed a distinct glowing ridge-line, like the spine of a half-buried sea-monster. He watched, partly mesmerised, as lights raced along the spine with the speed of shooting stars.

‘Do those cities have names, Swift?’

‘I am not sure you would perceive them as “cities”, Kanu. “Nodes” or “hubs” would be more accurate. Functional modules, like your own brain compartmentalisation. But yes, they do have distinct signifiers. Although again, “name” may be stretching things a little—’

‘When you’re done chatting,’ Korsakov said, ‘we could begin searching the ship with these internal sensors.’ He was bending over a console, tapping keys. Displays were coming online, showing blueprints and cross sections, and he drew their attention to a couple of them. ‘These areas appear to contain air, and these are where the ship seems to have lost pressure.’

‘Given the lack of time available to us,’ Dalal said, ‘it’ll be a token search. But at least we can go home saying we did the best we could.’

‘Should my compatriots find organic material,’ Swift said, ‘we would treat it with the utmost respect.’

‘Thank you, Swift,’ Kanu said, ‘but I’m not sure being shredded and incorporated into your neural-logic networks is the fate we’d want for our loved ones. Even if you did it respectfully.’

‘I can, nonetheless, assist with your search.’

The ambassadors looked at each other. Korsakov started to say something, but Kanu raised a hand.

‘No, it makes sense. One of him can do the work of four of us in about a thousandth of the time.’

‘I would not go quite that far,’ Swift said, ‘but I can certainly make a difference, given the time you have remaining.’

‘Yevgeny,’ said Dalal, ‘can you call up the sensor search on different consoles?’

‘It’s done. Five consoles – four for us and one for the machine. I’m already running a visual and infrared search on decks twelve to eighteen – don’t bother duplicating my efforts.’

‘We won’t,’ Kanu said.

The consoles were simple to use, and it did not take long to run at least a cursory search on each deck. They were looking for the obvious: survivors or bodies, in plain view. If people were hidden away in lockers, out of the reach of the sensors, there was nothing the ambassadors could do about it.

‘In ten minutes we’ll need to be on our way back down,’ Dalal announced. ‘And that’s assuming we cut our margins to the bone.’

‘Our margin is still good,’ Kanu said. He had searched half of his allotted area of the ship, seeing only empty corridors and service shafts, plus the occasional vault-like cargo bay. Since some of the bays retained pressure, there might be survivors hidden among the ranks of cargo pallets. But unless they made themselves known, they were going to remain there.

‘Wait,’ Lucien said, stepping back from vis console, vis gloved fingers spread wide. ‘I’ve just been locked out.’

After a moment, Dalal said, ‘And me.’

‘The fault has spread to my console as well,’ Swift said, his hands becoming a blur on the controls.

Kanu was also unable to continue his search, and he noticed Korsakov suffering the same problem. The schematics had vanished. All the displays were showing the same thing: a block of Swahili, appearing and disappearing over and over.

IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY WE RECLAIM THIS WORLD FOR PEOPLE! LET THIS BE THE FIRST LIGHT OF A NEW MARTIAN DAWN! LET FIRE CLEANSE THE FACE OF MARS IN READINESS FOR THE RECLAMATION!

‘The message was almost certainly meant to be read by robots, rather than humans,’ Swift said. ‘They would have been counting on us reaching the wreck in advance of any diplomatic party. Had you not arrived first, we would have triggered exactly this response.’

‘We’re leaving,’ Dalal said. ‘This instant.’

‘For once,’ Kanu said, ‘I think you’ll find the four of us in unanimous agreement.’

The elevator returned them to the level where they had boarded. They still had to pass through the airlock, but for the first time Kanu allowed himself to hope they might yet make it our alive.

‘Lucien is the newest ambassador,’ Dalal said. ‘Ve should go first. It’s only fair.’

‘Agreed,’ Kanu said. ‘It’s settled. Lucien first. Then you, Garudi. Yevgeny next, then me. Strict order of hierarchy, and save the arguing for later.’

Korsakov said, ‘You mean to be last, Kanu?’

‘Makes sense – I’ve been on Mars the longest.’

‘I won’t leave this ship with a robot still inside it, free to do what it likes with a human asset.’

Kanu had to stop himself seizing the other man by the shoulders. ‘Get some perspective, Yev. We were about to hand it over to the machines anyway.’

The lock was ready to receive Lucien. As the door closed, Dalal said, ‘Don’t wait for us outside. Get back to the flier and prepare to leave.’

Lucien gave a nod through vis visor as the door closed. Kanu watched the airlock indicators crawl through their automatic cycle.

‘I’m clear,’ Lucien said, after what felt like an eternity. ‘Jumping off.’ There was a thump, an intake of breath. ‘Down and moving. Flier is intact.’

‘Lock’s cycling for Garudi,’ Kanu said.

‘I could attempt to force the mechanism to open both doors at the same time,’ Swift said.

‘And risk jamming it completely?’ Korsakov said. ‘No. We’ll leave the way we came in.’

Finally the lock was ready to accept Dalal. She stepped inside, turned away from the door and initiated the cycle. The door sealed and the interminable process recommenced. Air out, door open, air in again. Kanu cursed the intransigent stupidity of the airlock for not understanding their deeper predicament.

‘I’m out,’ Dalal said. ‘Crossing ground. Lucien is at the flier. Are you all right?’

‘Yes, we’re fine. Yevgeny’s next.’

It could only have taken as long for Korsakov to cycle through the lock as the other two, but to Kanu it felt like at least twice as much time. Now there was so little to lose, he wondered if perhaps Swift ought to force the lock after all.

But the air was pumping back in now. Korsakov was outside.

‘Are you clear, Yev?’

‘I see the flier. Lucien and Garudi are aboard. She should have moved it by now – why is she delaying?’

‘Out of some misplaced concern for your well-being, perhaps?’

‘You should be next,’ Swift said.

‘No,’ Kanu answered. ‘You’re a witness to this and I want you to survive. If and when you make it back to your friends, they need to know that this was a terrorist act.’

‘My friends already know, Kanu.’

‘Maybe they do. But for my peace of mind, you’re still going first.’

Swift gave a perfunctory nod. ‘If you insist.’

‘I do.’

The lock was ready to accept Swift. He was on the verge of entering it when there came a sudden sharp blur of motion and Swift was on the other side of Kanu, the airlock vacant, and Kanu was being pushed – shoved was closer to the truth – into the waiting aperture.

‘Swift, no!’

‘It is within my capability to help you, Kanu. Therefore I have no option.’

Before he could act, Swift had pushed enough of himself into the lock to be able to activate the automatic sequence. It was a snakelike striking motion, almost too fast for the eye to follow. Kanu barely had time to register what had happened, let alone abort the lock sequence. Swift withdrew, the door sealed and the exchangers began to drag air out of the chamber.

‘The terms of our inspection visit are still in force, Swift! We have our one hour! It has not expired!’

‘Which is precisely why I will be joining you on the other side the moment the lock allows it.’