Poseidon's Wake (62 page)

The wheel would keep carrying them higher, and eventually the air would thin and cool. But facing that was better than boiling to death in the ocean, or being eaten by sea-monsters, Kanu told himself, and at least the wheel gave them time and the possibility, however slim, of rescue from above. Dared he pin his hopes on that?

No – not yet. Focus instead on the present moment, the immediate practicalities of survival. Secure in the groove, there was no chance of their falling out again now. Indeed, as the wheel turned, so the gradually steepening angle of the groove’s floor made it even less likely. Granted, it was a small thing. In an hour they had risen no more than a kilometre, by Kanu’s reckoning.

He was still breathing the ambient air. It was cooler now – almost pleasant compared to the heat of the ocean’s surface. It would keep cooling as they rose, though, cooling and thinning, and before very long it would not be breathable. They had both needed to tap into suit air and power while swimming, and now – according to the indicator on Kanu’s wrist – he had no more than fifteen hours of life-support remaining. Nissa’s suit was down to a similar margin. Worse than that, some of her suit systems were showing error conditions, presumably because of exposure to the water.

Nissa was standing at the edge of the groove, a sheer drop beyond her feet.

‘We won’t have to freeze or suffocate if we don’t want to. There’s always that.’

‘Perhaps we’d have been better off in the ocean,’ Kanu said, fiddling with his suit’s communication settings.

‘I’ll regret not knowing more about those moons,’ said Swift, who was sitting on the very edge of the groove, his stockinged legs dangling over the drop. He had his pince-nez glasses in one hand, squinting against some microscopic blemish on the lens. ‘But I cannot be too ungrateful. To have come this far, to have touched the wheel itself – that’s more than we had any right to expect.’

‘We’ve learned nothing,’ Kanu said, overcome by a sudden fatalistic gloom. ‘The wheel’s still a closed book. Just because we’re in it doesn’t mean it’s suddenly revealed its secrets.’

‘The grooves are a form of Mandala grammar,’ Swift said. ‘I don’t have to understand it to recognise it. Although a little of the meaning keeps suggesting itself to me rather coyly, but I can’t quite bring it into focus. Do you have the same sense of the numinous?’

‘Something came through to us,’ Nissa said. ‘Some knowledge, some information, when we felt the Terror. Just as Chiku told us.’

‘Secrets and imponderables.’ Swift settled the pince-nez back into place on the bridge of his nose. ‘I rather feel for Hector. Do you think he will be all right?’

Hector was balled up at the back of the groove. The Tantor had said nothing since Dakota’s death, and they had been careful not to press him. It was not necessarily some fault of his suit, Kanu decided, but the terrible weight of a loss none of them could begin to appreciate. She had been more than a matriarch to the Risen. She had been the spearhead of a new order of being – a vanguard of promise and power.

‘We’re all going to die, Swift,’ Kanu said, allowing a little of his anger to flash through. ‘None of us is going to be “all right”. And you being in our heads isn’t going to change that.’

‘You are a rational animal, Kanu,’ Swift said amiably. ‘You would not have placed us in this position unless you thought there was some hope of survival. You know full well that the wheel is turning, and that it will take us higher.’

‘Our suits don’t have enough life left in them. It’s just a question of which kills us first – the cold or the thinning air.’

‘Or, as Nissa said, you can choose the drop. But you won’t do that. Neither of you has it in you to abandon Hector. For which I am glad.’

‘Glad?’ Kanu asked.

Swift nodded to the sky beyond the groove, where a bright moving spark was crossing the darkening zenith.

‘That, if I’m not very much mistaken, is a Chibesa signature.’

Something crackled across his helmet channel.

‘Kanu Akinya,’ he said.

Another crackle, a silence, then a broken, nervous voice – as if she had not even dared hope she might receive an response and was not quite ready to trust what her ears were telling her.

‘This is Goma. Are you all right?’

‘For the moment. Ask me again in fifteen hours. Is that your ship we can see?’

‘It must be. We can see your thermal signatures on the wheel – we tracked you from the moment you splashed down. The wheel’s bringing you higher – it looks like it’s rotating!’

‘Not that it’ll do us much good, I’m afraid, but it felt better than staying in the sea.’

‘You’re not out of options just yet, Kanu. You’re coming up to us, and we have every intention of coming down to meet you. Can you hold out for those fifteen hours? You may need every last minute of them.’

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Captain Vasin had needed considerable persuasion to take
Mposi
into the moons’ sphere of influence, still more to contemplate touching down anywhere on the upper surface of the wheel. But even after she agreed to attempt a rescue, her technical objections – fair and reasonable as they were – still applied.
Mposi
’s design was not compatible with entry into deep atmosphere. The ship would tear itself apart, or roast itself, or both, before it got within thirty kilometres of the surface.

Eunice argued that they should set down at exactly that threshold, thirty kilometres, while praying that each and every variable happened to line up in their favour. If the hull survived the re-entry forces, and the engine did not quite overheat . . .

Vasin was having none of that. She would consent to a touchdown at fifty kilometres, halfway to the wheel’s summit on the ascendant side. But she would not let
Mposi
stay where it landed. They would unload the rescue party, allow them to get to a safe distance, and then
Mposi
would take off again before the wheel’s rotation carried it over the wheel’s summit and then began to lower it too deeply into the atmosphere on the wheel’s downturn.

‘Forty kilometres, if you’re going to make life difficult,’ Eunice said. ‘Then you can stay on station until at least the apex without going too deep into the atmosphere. I like that a lot better than watching you fly off again while we’re still on the wheel.’

‘What you like and what you get are two different things.’

‘Not in my experience. This is space travel, Captain Vasin. There is no part of it that’s risk-free.’

‘Managed risk, then.’

‘What do you think I’m doing if not managing your risk? At forty, the ship won’t know the difference from a fifty. We’re looking at a tiny increase in pressure – not enough to hurt us.’

‘If I give you forty, you’ll push for thirty.’

‘Not this time – I want to live as much as you do. I’d just rather do so knowing we’d done our best for those people.’

‘And the elephant.’

‘The elephant is one of the people. Speaking of which, we’re going to have to find room for him inside this ship. If emergency adaptations are required, now would be the time to start making them.’

The sparring went on like that for the better part of an hour, neither of them conceding any significant ground. Goma would have found it infuriating, but the truth was they still had time to make the final decision. Until
Mposi
was closer to the wheel, their exact point of landing was up for debate. It would only take a few minutes to go shallower or higher, depending on who won.

Whichever they decided, it was not going to be a simple rescue operation.

In her conversation with Kanu, she had learned that the three survivors of the
Icebreaker
expedition who had managed to scramble into the groove were wearing spacesuits. But the humans’ suits would not be able to keep them alive until they were in true vacuum. At best, they had the means to hold out until they were twenty kilometres above the surface, and that would be at the extreme edge of survivability.
Mposi
’s rescue party had to reach them quickly if they were to make any difference to their chances.

Eunice had inventoried the supplies. They had plenty of supplementary oxygen and power cells, and the coupling interfaces ought to be common between the various suit designs. But their longest tether was fifty kilometres, and there was no reliable way of coupling the shorter tethers together to make something longer. No matter which way she looked at it, they would have to make do with that one long tether.

‘Can we get that down to them?’ Goma asked.

‘Yes, I think so,’ Eunice said. ‘Reel out at the maximum speed the winch allows, abseil down the wheel. The wheel’s rotation will tend to act against us, but provided we can move at more than one or two kilometres per hour, we’ll easily beat the rotation.’

‘Faster than that, I hope,’ Goma said. ‘And coming back up?’

‘Haul in the way we hauled out. And if that fails, we just ride the wheel up to the top.’

‘You make it sound easy.’

‘I’m involved, so there’s a very good chance it won’t be. Incidentally, what was the part about “we”?’

‘It’ll take more than one of us to carry the supplies. Besides, there’s a Tantor down there. Ru and I want to be part of this.’

‘Want – or feel you must?’

‘Don’t make this harder than it has to be, Eunice. We’re going down, with or without you.’

‘And the number of hours you’ve spent in a spacesuit . . . ?’

‘We’ll have you along to show us how it’s done, won’t we?’

‘I’d argue with you, but I suspect it would feel a bit like arguing with myself.’

‘Futile?’

‘Boring.’

Mposi
continued its approach to the wheel, moving at much less than orbital speed and slowing all the while. Eunice and Vasin continued their horse-trading over altitude and risk. Gradually Eunice appeared to be getting her message through: given the supplies they had, going deep was the only way of reaching Kanu’s party in time.

They circled the top of the wheel, recording its grooved structures at maximum resolution in every waveband
Mposi
was capable of registering. In the hours since Kanu reached the wheel, the sun had set on that part of Poseidon. It was now night-time at the wheel’s base and would remain so for another ten hours. But the wheel’s top was still catching the refracted light of the setting sun, shining a reddening gold. And there were other wheels, and they would all need to be compared, cross-referenced. There was work here for a lifetime – many lifetimes. They had been allowed access to Poseidon for now, permitted to slip through the cordon of moons on this one occasion, but there was no telling how long that licence might be good for.

Goma figured they had better make the most of it while they had the chance.

She spoke to Kanu again. ‘How are you holding out?’

‘We’re on suit air for fifty per cent of the time. Trying to buy some hours, not that one or two will make much difference. Are you any closer with that rescue plan?’

‘Yes, but it’s going to involve you sitting tight a little longer than you might like.’

She heard the smile in his voice. ‘I’m hardly in a position to complain. What do you have in mind?’

‘We’re going to lower a line down to you. But not vertically – it would be too risky to hover
Mposi
like that, and we wouldn’t be able to offer you any assistance at your end. Better if we lower the ship down the curve of the wheel. We’ll land at the lowest altitude the captain’s happy with – Eunice has talked her down to forty kilometres.’

‘Is that safe for you?’

‘The ship’s not really built for it. But of course Eunice says safety margins are meant to be tested.’

‘Please, Goma – don’t take any risks on our behalf.’

‘You don’t get a say, Kanu. Besides, you have one of the Risen with you.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Around here, at least, the Risen just became an endangered species again. We owe it to ourselves to do all we can for Hector, but I can’t promise it’ll be easy. Our tether’s shorter than we’d like. If we touch down at forty kilometres, we can just reach you, but you’ll need to hold out until you’re close to the limits of survivability. If all goes well, we should be able to get down to you before you’re much higher than fifteen or twenty kilometres up.’

‘That’ll be cutting it fine.’

‘No other way, Kanu. But we’ll have oxygen and power when we reach you. Don’t be alarmed if you see the ship lift off – Gandhari’s going to circle around for a few hours before coming back in.’

‘This is more than we were hoping for, Goma.’

‘It’s what Mposi would have done. While we carry his name, we’d better try to live up to it.’

‘You already have.’

‘I’m signing off now. Once we’re on the tether, we’ll speak again. For now, keep warm and conserve your supplies. See you soon, Uncle Kanu.’

‘See you soon, niece of mine.’

They lowered into the atmosphere on a spike of Chibesa thrust, dialled back to the minimum necessary to support
Mposi
against Poseidon’s gravity. It was silent to begin with, the descent as smooth and uncomplicated as when they landed on Orison. But the air was thickening with each kilometre closer to the sea, and as the Chibesa exhaust began to interact with the atmosphere, so the physics of the plasma exhaust began to turn messy. The engine could adjust, up to a point. It damped shock waves and smothered runaway instabilities before they had a chance to manifest as bumps or lurches felt by the human crew. It whispered sweet nothings at turbulence and laminar-flow boundaries. It brought to bear a monstrous amount of computation, calculating its way around the curdled, fractal corners of emergent chaos.

But they had to go deeper.

Vasin was at the controls, her seat pushed out into the armoured eye of the bubble cockpit, shaking her head all the while as if – despite having agreed to this – she was still not convinced that it was anything but the utmost foolishness, guaranteed to wreck them all.
Mposi
sounded a mounting chorus of status warnings and master caution alarms, and the engine surged and ebbed as it tried to balance the demands being placed upon it.

Deeper still.

Chaotic interaction with the high atmosphere was only part of the problem. Now the heat transfer from the exhaust to the surrounding air was beginning to overload the engine’s own cooling capabilities. Refrigeration pumps and heat exchangers surged and screamed beyond their normal tolerances.

Still more alarms.

But Vasin had given Eunice her word, and Kanu in turn had been led to believe there was a chance of rescue. Goma understood, in a flash of admiration and empathy, that Vasin would not now turn back; her commitment was total. Having said she would do this one thing, their captain would not surrender.

Fifty kilometres from the seas of Poseidon.

Forty-five.

Vasin deployed the undercarriage. They had descended on one side of the wheel, but now she vectored them sideways until they were almost hovering over the tread itself. What had been taxing now became doubly difficult because she did not want the Chibesa exhaust coming anywhere near the fabric of the wheel, for fear that it would cause an explosion or be interpreted as a hostile act.

These fears struck Goma as perfectly reasonable.

The thrust had to be feathered now, vectored out at sharp angles, and that in turn meant an increased load on the engine just to hover.
Mposi
by then had gone berserk with its own anxieties. Vasin cancelled all the alarms and got a small round of applause from her crew.

‘Probably for the best. I don’t think I want a second’s warning when things go completely wrong.’

‘You’re doing wonderfully, Gandhari,’ Goma said.

‘You sound like your uncle.’

Goma did not know what to say to that. But she was not displeased by it.

Now came the hard part, as if it had been plain sailing until now. They had to land, or at least hold station, while the rescue party was unloaded.

It would have been easy enough on the wheel’s summit, where the great curve approximated a level surface. Here, though, they were not even halfway to the top. At forty kilometres above the sea, the inclined tread of the wheel was thirty degrees away from a sheer surface. Only the grooves offered any possibility of a secure footing.

Vasin brought them in close, veered out, came in closer again – all the while making tiny adjustments to the landing gear. ‘No one move around much,’ she said. ‘And if you want to try not breathing for a bit, that would help.’

The moment of landing, when it came, was barely a kiss of contact.
Mposi
swayed, its gear taking up the load as the engine slowly throttled down to zero thrust. Through one set of windows, Goma saw only the near face of the wheel, almost close enough to touch if the window’s glass had not been in her way. She wondered how they had managed to land at all.

‘Unload as quickly as you can,’ Vasin said, not stirring from her command seat. ‘Use the secondary lock, not the primary, and take care on your way out. Watch when you bring out the winch gear – it’s heavy, and our balance may shift.’

They had begun putting on their spacesuits before the final approach to the wheel, so now there were only final preparations to be made. Eunice had left her suit behind on
Travertine
, so they were all using the same standard model carried aboard
Mposi
. She was less than happy about that, scowling at the life-support controls built into her sleeve and shaking her head in disgust.

‘What is this horse piss? You’re supposed to get better at making things, not worse.’

‘Shut up and put up with it, the way we have to put up with you,’ Ru said.

They locked on their helmets, checked comms and began unloading the equipment.

It was only when Goma was outside that she could see how skilfully Vasin had put down the lander. It had been a tricky bit of work, worthy of grudging admiration even from Eunice. Two of the four landing legs were planted into the groove, compressed to their minimum extension. The other two, stretched out as far as they would go, were braced against the steep side of the wheel between the groove they were in and the next one down. The landing feet on that side were angled to their limit, relying on friction to support them to the lander.

It looked precarious, which it was. Eunice said that she had seen some nastier landing configurations, but not since the days of chemical rockets. Vasin was even applying a constant torque of steering thrust from one of the lander’s auxillary motors, a cruciform-shaped module high up the side of the hull, near the out-jutting control bubble. Without that corrective thrust, there would be little to stop the lander toppling away from the vertical.

‘But I can’t keep bleeding that jet,’ Vasin said. ‘It’s not meant for sustained use, and it’s not fed from the Chibesa core. Once that tank’s empty, we’re in trouble. I’ll need to lift as soon as you’re independent.’