Said and Wahir peered out from behind Ariadne and started to edge back. The circumference of the ship kept on expanding, the ice kept on breaking and sliding, until almost all the lake was on the move. The noise was incredible, a thunderous bass roar with random concussions that made the air vibrate.
The wind caught the water falling from the hull, turned it to ice and blew it in their faces. It forced them to turn away for a moment until the storm was over, and the chunks of ice had finished splashing down into the refilling lake.
Va looked behind him. ‘Bigger than yours, Maghrebi.’
‘And they say size doesn’t matter.’
Persephone Shipsister was three times the length of Ariadne, with two drive pods and a cavernous cargo bay. She spun slowly on her axis, then drifted overhead in search of a landing site. She took a long time to pass by. Ariadne finally brought her down a couple of ship lengths distant, and at an angle. Loose rocks tumbled away, then it was quiet again except for the hiss of the wind.
‘Now,’ said Benzamir, ‘all we have to do is get on board.’
CHAPTER 40
GETTING INSIDE WAS simple once they discovered that Persephone’s main cargo bay doors were open. The ship had been stripped, flooded and abandoned, nothing more than a corpse weighed down with chains and thrown into the deep.
She had been such a magnificent ship. Now she was gone. But Benzamir had to make sure.
They climbed inside the cavernous hold, full of dripping and clammy chill. Their breath condensed in clouds in front of their faces and hung there until swatted away.
Benzamir deployed his light-bees, and sent them up to the ceiling before exploring every dark crevice.
‘Nothing. If it wasn’t nailed down, it’s gone.’ He summoned the bees back. ‘Why would they do this to their own ship? What could they possibly gain?’
Said turned to look back at the daylight. ‘How long has it lain there?’
‘Months. Maybe a year, even. But they landed here, and that doesn’t make sense.’
‘Perhaps they had no choice?’
Benzamir crouched down and drew on the deck with a gloved finger. ‘Nobody say anything, just for a moment.’
They waited for him, listening to the sound of falling water both near and distant.
‘The brain,’ he said. ‘Ariadne, give me the schematics. Stay close,’ he told them. ‘You don’t want to get lost.’
He led them deep into the heart of Persephone, a little bubble of light surrounded by so much darkness.
‘Said, you said they had no choice as to where to land. I think that’s the truth of it. Imagine you had the whole world to choose from: why here? It’s a hostile environment, months of darkness, freezing winds, little in the way of natural resources and no people – the very people you wanted to meet and change. Imagine instead that you were on a ship which you could barely control, which you had to force to the ground by doing the whole finger-of-God, blazing trail through the atmosphere thing. You’d want to land where there were no natives.’ He reached a door, the only one in the whole ship that was closed. He brought the light-bees closer.
The door was deeply scarred and buckled. It had been forced shut and welded so that no one might ever go in again.
Va reached forward and rested his fingertips on the metal. ‘These marks. They had to fight their way in here.’
‘Let’s see what they’ve done.’ Benzamir got out his little laser and began to carefully cut away the welds. When it grew too hot to hold any more, he resorted to using the length of pipe that Said still carried.
When he grew tired, Va took over, hitting the door again and again and again until the whole ship rang with the sound. Benzamir cooled the laser down in a puddle of water, and eventually it worked again.
‘Enough, Brother.’
‘I’m almost through,’ Va said, grunting with effort.
‘I know.’
Benzamir pulsed the laser once through the last remaining weld, and the door sagged. Wahir made to push it, but he was held back. ‘You might damage something inside. The brain is a very delicate thing.’
He eased the door so that he could get his fingers around it, then slid it sideways. It jammed, and he used the pipe to work it open a little more, until he could squeeze through. His light-bees followed him.
It wasn’t a room intended for humans: too small, too full, too strange. Benzamir’s head pressed against the black fractal radiators fixed to the ceiling, and his feet barely fitted in the narrow gap between the wall and the panels that ranged from floor to roof.
He got down on his hands and knees. Some of the panel fronts were lying scattered on the floor, and when he looked inside the narrow duct, he could see disconnected brain modules discarded where they fell. He reached in and picked one up as delicately as he could.
‘Ari?’ He showed her what he could see through his eyes.
‘This is not good.’
‘I know. What’s left of her might never recover.’
‘We have to try, Benzamir.’
‘There are other panels loose. I won’t know which is memory, which is motor control, which is high function. I’m going to put them in wrong, whatever I do. And even then . . .’ He pushed back against the bulkhead and let his body sag.
‘My shipsister.’
Benzamir turned the module in his hand and watched the light play across the etched surfaces. ‘Some of these are damaged. Scratched. Chipped.’
‘You are preparing me for the fact that, at best, she still might be . . . not Persephone. But it’s in your nature to try nevertheless.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ He carefully put the module down and shuffled back over to the door.
‘Master? Can we come in yet?’
‘Best that you don’t. Look, I might be a while. I’ve got’ – he looked round at all the loose panels – ‘a delicate job that needs all my attention. Take one of my light-bees and go back to Ariadne.’
Wahir put his head through the gap. ‘What is that?’
‘It’s Persephone’s brain, or what’s left of it. Someone’s ripped pieces out of it at random. We build them, and the ships are born into them. They were never meant to be taken apart after that. Ships are special, Wahir. They’re not pets, not servants, not machines. We love each other. Which sounds stupid, just said like that.’
‘Not at all, master. Like a trusted camel.’ Wahir reached forward and closed his fist around one of the light-bees, then tentatively set it free above his own head. His face cracked into a smile.
‘You’re just like me. Now go. I’ll see you back in Ariadne.’
The light in the corridor receded, and Benzamir bent to his task. He couldn’t work with the thick coverall gloves on, so he undid the wrist seals and placed them just outside the door.
He lay down on the floor, stretched his arm out and slid it into the first duct. He could barely see what he was doing, relying mainly on touch and faith as he started to ease the modules back into place. He was doing it with infinitely more care than those who had removed them, but he was aware that even by touching the modules he was introducing errors: dust, grease, static, the pressure of his fingertips. He was more likely to be killing the ship than curing her.
Eventually he stopped. ‘Ari, I can’t carry on.’
‘You must.’
He rolled awkwardly onto his back, flexing his wrist and fingers. He began to cry. ‘She’s gone, Ari. They’ve destroyed her. I can’t put her back together again, no matter how much I want to.’
‘Why? Why would they do this?’
‘Because she turned against them. I don’t know when that happened: after she’d entered the Earth’s system, before they landed. She repented of her crime, and they killed her for it.’