Poseidon's Wake - Страница 43

‘You don’t know this ship any better than I do.’

‘That is true, but I can learn faster. I also have a great deal of technical knowledge to draw upon and the not inconsiderable advantage of being utterly infallible in my decision-making. We will hit the ice in about eight minutes, if those depth readings are to be trusted. I think that should be sufficient time for me to master the controls.’

Kanu knew that a moment like this was coming — the moment when he had no option but to surrender himself to the machines.

‘You didn’t need to ask, did you? You’re so much a part of me now that you could have taken me over at any point — hijacked complete control of my nervous system.’

‘If the integration were not as thorough as it is,’ Swift said, ‘it would have been easily detected. To answer your question, though: yes, I could have assumed control at any time and I will do so in an instant if your life is imperilled. But as this situation is not quite that critical, I thought it polite to ask first. We have, I believe, just under seven minutes and thirty seconds left now. Will you allow me, Kanu?’

At least one life — possibly much more than one life — hinged on this moment. For an instant, it was more than he could bear. But if he did not give himself completely to Swift, there was no point in carrying on. He had come this far, from the limbo of death on Mars, to serve one truth: the machines were not his enemy, and he was not theirs.

‘Do it.’

Swift walked over to Kanu, slipped his form through the horseshoe console as if it were made of gas and lowered himself into the chair Kanu already occupied. The figment’s body folded neatly into the same space and submerged beneath Kanu’s skin.

For a breath or two, Kanu felt no change.

Then Swift had him.

Since the thing inside his head was entirely biological — a separate personality utilising the same meat substrate on which his own consciousness now ran — Swift could only communicate with the outside world via the channels of Kanu’s own senses. He could not address the ship directly or read its mysteries via some direct neural connection. But he could see, and speak, and listen, and make Kanu’s hands move with card-sharp speed across the console.

Kanu, in turn, felt himself being ruthlessly puppeteered. The muscles and tendons in his arms were not used to interpreting such a barrage of nerve signals. His eyes moved from one focus to another so quickly that Kanu’s visual flow shattered. He could feel the ocular muscles being cruelly overclocked, made to run faster than nature had intended. He visualised himself as he might have appeared had anyone been there to witness him: a man in a chair, twitching and jerking as if in the throes of a seizure or some prolonged electrical execution. He was even speaking — or rather giving out short, yelping utterances that bore little resemblance to Swahili, or indeed any human language, for that matter.

But the ship understood. It understood and it was talking back, giving Swift the information and resources he needed.

When Swift relinquished absolute control, Kanu felt the cutting of the puppet strings as an almost psychic severance. He slumped back in the seat, drained and in no small amount of pain after the way he had been manipulated. Swift was still there, though, his presence riding Kanu’s consciousness like a passenger.

‘I’ve made some adjustments to the display options. If you look up, the view through the ceiling shows exactly what is above us as we ascend. As you can see, the Margrave has not let us down — the charges are detonating.’

They were still looking through inky kilometres of ocean, so the light reaching Kanu’s eyes must have been amplified many times. Nonetheless, the stuttering milky flashes — like the lightning from a storm system well over the horizon — could only be the demolition charges, sewn through the ice when the ship was first entombed. There appeared to be no end to the explosions — dozens, then hundreds of separate pulses of light tracing a cobweb of radial and concentric lines. They were shattering the overlying ice, rendering it locally weak rather than blasting it away in a single massive detonation. Twenty kilometres of it was pulverised — ice turning to slush, slush to water, water to steam — while great chunks, house- or palace-sized, remained intact.

‘It’s not enough,’ Kanu said. ‘We’ve miscalculated. We’ll never punch through that!’

‘It will be sufficient. As soon as there is a clear passage to space, the water will begin to geyser out into the vacuum. That in turn will help disperse the remaining fragments. Besides, the charges are still detonating! He must have sewn thousands of them. For a human, he has shown remarkable thoroughness.’

‘I’m not sure he’d take that as a compliment.’

Kanu’s faith in the Margrave was not misplaced. As the ship closed the distance to the ceiling, so the explosions finally pushed a channel through to the Outside, a portal to the rest of the universe, and from that moment the process became self-sustaining as the water turned instantly to vapour, and the rocketing vapour forced the remaining fragments further apart.

‘Core initialising,’ Swift reported. ‘Momentum will carry us through the breach and we’ll switch immediately to full Chibesa thrust before Europa pulls us back. That will be the moment of maximum risk, Kanu. On the positive side, if things do go wrong, there’s little likelihood of you knowing about it. I should brace, if I were you. Our passage will still be a little bumpy.’

And it was — ice clanged and scraped against the hull on all sides — but Kanu was reasonably certain that such things had been allowed for. Even so, he gripped the arms of his seat and jammed his head hard against the headrest. The vibrations made his eyes blur. He closed them and willed this to be over. The rough passage reached a moment of maximum turbulence, and then the knocks and clangs and ice-rumbles began to diminish. A moment or two later they were clear, the ride perfectly smooth, and Kanu felt himself begin to float from the chair until the restraint redoubled its hold on him.

‘Clear of the surface,’ Swift said. ‘Pivoting to bring drive exhaust clear of the horizon. Ignition in three… two…’

When weight returned, it felt as if someone had driven a mallet into the base of his spine. He sensed a bony shock wave moving up to his skull, the compression and relaxation of vertebrae, the sequenced stressing of nerves and muscle groups, gravity reaching and then exceeding Europa’s pull. Had to be one gee, maybe two. Swift was really gunning it.

‘One-third of a gee,’ Swift said, adding insult to Kanu’s discomfort. ‘Chibesa core operating normally. The ship will run some automatic calibration checks then increase to half a gee. Congratulations, Mr Akinya — you have yourself a starship.’

At last Kanu opened his eyes. He still felt jammed into the seat, oppressed by cruel force.

‘It works.’

‘Early days, I believe is the expression. Still, to have come this far is unquestionably something. Have you considered a name for this ship?’

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Icebreaker. That’s what it should have been all along.’

‘Icebreaker it is, then. There’s a family connection to that name, isn’t there — some other ship?’

‘If you say so, Swift.’

Kanu felt none of the triumph he had expected, only a nagging ulcerous guilt, a sense that he had fled the scene of a crime.

‘Will the wound heal?’

‘Soon enough. Actually, we’ve done very little harm compared to the damage inflicted by natural impactors over billions of years. And just as Europa’s ice has re-formed over those wounds, so it will eventually seal this gap.’

‘I hope the Margrave is all right.’

‘So do I, but right now we have our own concerns. Our emergence point has naturally become the focus for those Consolidation vehicles. They are attempting to close on us.’

‘And if they get within range and try to stop us?’

‘Judging from these control interfaces, we appear to have weapons. Your family obviously thought they might come in useful.’

Kanu had spent enough time under the shadow of the Martian defence fortresses that the thought of space weapons did not immediately revolt him. The Consolidation vehicles would certainly be armed — even if most of those armaments could be excused as normal precautionary hardware. Space was full of things that sometimes needed to be shot out of the way or destroyed.

Sometimes those things were other ships.

‘We won’t use them except in self-defence. Is that understood, Swift?’

‘Self-defence is an exceedingly elastic concept. Would you be so good as to narrow the parameters?’

Before he could answer, the console chimed.

‘Incoming transmission from one of the enforcement vehicles,’ Swift said. ‘Addressed directly to you. Who could know you are aboard when we’ve barely started our journey?’

‘You know exactly who if you’ve been riding inside my head since Mars. Yevgeny Korsakov.’

Korsakov’s face loomed large before Kanu, superimposed over the forward area of the window. He looked, if anything, even older than when they had last spoken — his skin collapsing into the event horizon of his skull, which would soon claim everything near it. The collar of his UON uniform was too generous for his neck, as if he had pulled the wrong outfit from the wardrobe. A wizened child wearing his father’s uniform.