‘Ari, take us down.’ He pointed to a hill a little way from the coast, just above a broad lake still sealed with ice. ‘Just there.’
‘Can I remind you that you said we didn’t even have time to fix your leg?’
He walked slowly back to the pilot’s chair, and sat rubbing his knee as Ariadne abandoned her methodical search for his wild-goose chase. He felt gravity shift subtly as she killed her orbital speed and began to fall.
‘Give me the outside view.’
‘What am I going to find?’ she asked. ‘There is literally nothing there. No people, no buildings, no debris, nothing more complex than sea-birds, no plant life higher than moss.’
When Benzamir didn’t answer, Ariadne threw herself at the Earth, and her underside glowed with white heat. A tremor rattled the ship, and another, as air was crushed and thrown aside by her passing. Then it came constantly, a quivering high-pitched squeal almost too high to register. Benzamir’s view flickered with orange light.
Wahir and Said drifted onto the flight deck.
‘Master, what’s happening?’
‘Aero-braking. Up among the stars, speed is a trivial thing. But we’re moving so fast, even the air is like a wall we have to batter our way through.’
‘Is that real fire?’ asked Wahir. He walked forward until he was within the projection, his legs disappearing under the shelf of land. He looked around him, dipped his hand down and poked the image.
‘Real fire.’ Benzamir sat upright. ‘If there were people down below, they would hear distant thunder and look up. They’d see us as a streak of light pointing down towards the ground and they’d wonder. But here there’s no one to see us. There never were any witnesses when it happened the first time, and there won’t be now.’
‘The first time?’ said Said.
‘I asked everywhere I went. Have you seen anything strange in the sky? Something falling to the ground in a fireball? But they hadn’t.’ He was distracted by Wahir’s cavorting through the display as the boy ducked down and up again, as if he was a swimmer in a strange, luminous sea. ‘It turns out we were asking in all the wrong places.’
Benzamir, despite his aches, crouched forward, as if watching Wahir but staring into the dark around him. The light-show ended, and with it the trembling of the hull. Settling in thick air, Ariadne dropped her front and took control of flying the course to their landing point.
They circled once, and it looked no different to how it had looked from orbit. Black rock, sharp and brittle, smudged with lichen where the freezing Antarctic wind didn’t tear quite as fiercely. White ice, broken at the margins into misshapen slabs, polished at the centre, gleaming like a mirror in the low-angled light.
Then they landed, and Benzamir walked back through the ship to the cargo hold. Said and Wahir trailed after him, and Va met them inside.
‘The ship has stopped,’ he said nasally. Two wads of linen were rammed in his nostrils.
‘I’m going on a little field trip.’ Benzamir looked at the men. ‘Looks like a boys only expedition.’
He opened a locker and threw out three thick all-in-ones before getting one for himself. He showed them how to step into them, seal them up and activate the heating circuits.
Said’s was too small. Wahir’s drowned him. Va’s fitted best of all, and he just looked ridiculous, with his habit riding up inside and making the overall bulge in unseemly places.
‘By any scale of measurement you want to use, it’s really cold outside. You’ll need to put up your hood, and please, don’t lick anything metal.’ Benzamir collected a tool like a thick, hollow pipe and stepped over to the iris in the floor. It spun open, and the heat stole from the room. He jumped down. His boots crunched against the rock, and he ducked down to clear the last of Ariadne’s hull.
The others emerged, one by one, blinking in the daylight. Va nodded approvingly.
‘A good place. Lakes and hills. It reminds me of Finnland.’ He looked around. ‘Where are the trees?’
Benzamir adjusted Wahir’s suit so that he could see out. ‘Give it another thousand years, Brother, and there might be soil enough. When my people were last here, it was covered in ice all the way up to the tops of those mountains.’ He pointed to a distant range.
The Antarctic air was so clear that it was impossible to judge how far away or how high the peaks were. Va was clearly sceptical.
‘If you want, I can show you how the world once looked. It’s very instructive.’ Benzamir hefted the pipe and set off down to the lake shore, scrambling over frost-shattered boulders and skidding on patches of scree.
Va kept pace, and Wahir bounded along with all the recklessness of youth. Said pulled his hood tighter around his face and shivered.
They gathered at the edge of the crust of ice. Benzamir stepped out on it and gave a few exploratory jumps. The surface creaked, but held.
‘Right then, gentlemen. What can you see?’
For Wahir it was all too like being in madrasah again. ‘Can you not just tell us, master?’
‘I suppose I could. That would be novel.’ He spun the pipe in his hands like a quarterstaff. ‘Come with me.’
When they were in the middle of the lake, the creaking noise became so severe that Benzamir ordered them to space themselves out. In a month’s time the ice would have gone, but he couldn’t wait. He swung the pipe high up over his head.
‘What magic does this do, master?’
‘None at all. It’s a bit of pipe.’ He brought it down end on, and the surface crazed and cracked. Again, and he punched a ragged hole through. Water welled up thickly and seeped across the ice. He threw the pipe to Said and unsealed his suit so that he could reach his pocket. He retrieved two light-bees, then sealed himself back up. He tipped the bees in his palm into the hole he’d made. ‘Look down.’
They could see two lights blossom into life, dimly at first, then brighter. They could see the patterns in the clear ice, the bubbles of air caught like flies within its structure.
‘The water is incredibly clear. You should be able to see the bottom of the lake.’
The light-bees burrowed down through the column of water and started to illuminate a shape. The bees moved around it, under it. It was huge, with two inward curving spines and a fat body like a gourd.
‘What,’ asked Va, ‘is that?’
‘I hate to be proved right, especially in this case. It’s Persephone Shipsister.’
Ariadne fretted: ‘My shipsister. What have they done to her?’
‘We’re going to have to get her out of there before we can find out.’
‘She is dead, Benzamir, they’ve killed her.’
‘Ari. We don’t know.’
‘There’s nothing coming from her. I’m trying everything but there’s nothing to get hold of. Everything is offline. This can’t be true.’
‘Try the embryonic remote connection.’
‘It must be atrophied.’
‘I’m sure it will be, but try anyway.’
She was silent while she struggled to secure the ancient protocols. With Persephone as quiet as the grave, it was just possible that she could be crudely controlled by Ariadne as if she was a pre-born ship with no mind of her own.
‘There is . . . something. The bandwidth is almost nonexistent.’
Benzamir turned his heating circuits up another notch and stamped his feet. Wahir and Said had taken shelter in the lee of the craft, and only Va was with him, sucking chill air through his mouth and straight into his lungs. He didn’t seem to be coming to any harm.
‘Can you power her up?’
‘I might, if you stopped talking.’
‘Oh.’
The sun swung round and started its long, slow slide back towards the horizon. Finally the ground trembled.
‘Good work.’
There was nothing else for a while, then suddenly the lake ice cracked, rose, splintered, and fell in cascading sheets of crystal that in turn were bounced up again. A dark shape streaming white water broached the surface, then continued to rise inexorably.