Poseidon's Wake Read Online Free PDF

touched a hand to his frock-coated chest. ‘I am still very attached to this body. It would be a nuisance to have to make a new one.’
    Korsakov scowled in annoyance.
    The three flying things were smaller than the ambassadorial vehicle, each a bronze ellipsoid with blue and red lights glowing through from within. How they flew was open to conjecture. Once, humans would have harvested their technological cleverness for profit, but those days were long behind them. The three machines enclosed the flier in a triangular formation.
    ‘You are free to descend,’ Swift said.
    Dalal took them down to an altitude of only two kilometres above the mean surface level, close enough that the robots’ workings were in plain view. At periodic intervals, the machines had built towering diamond-faceted citadels on the face of Mars. They studded the surface like anthills, beehives or ice-cream cornets. They were huge, candy-coloured, aglow with secret purpose. Tentacular tubes linked them, hundreds, maybe thousands of kilometres long. Glowing corpuscular things shot along these tubes, or occasionally moved through the air between the citadels.
    Undoubtedly there was much more going on beneath the crust, beyond the easy scrutiny of orbital sensors.
    ‘Coming up on the impact site,’ Dalal announced. ‘Twenty kilometres dead ahead. Visual on it now. Dropping speed to minimum. Swift – please remind your friends of our agreed intentions?’
    ‘All is in hand,’ Swift said.
    Still accompanied by their machine escort, the ambassadors made a slow approach to the object of their interest. It was bigger than Kanu had expected – skyscraper-sized. An ugly squared-off thing never designed to move through air, it resembled a grey metal filing cabinet and was jammed into a sand dune like a surrealist art installation. He thought of his grandmother’s sculptures, and wondered whether Sunday would have appreciated the comparison.
    ‘An hour is an insult,’ Korsakov said, tapping life-support instructions into his suit cuff.
    ‘We’ll make the best of it,’ Kanu answered.
    ‘Always the optimist, merman.’
    ‘I try, Yevgeny. There are worse habits.’
    They could not land on or dock with the tilted, damaged wreck, but orbital surveillance had identified a possible entrance just above the point where the ship met the ground. It was a tiny airlock, but it would have to suffice. They circled once, verifying that the lock was as it had appeared from space, and then settled down about fifty metres from the wreck.
    All in hand, as Swift had said.
    When the flier was down, Dalal pumped the air out of the cockpit and lowered the boarding ramp. Korsakov and Lucien were the first to exit, followed by Kanu, then Swift – Swift, of course, had no need of a spacesuit – and finally Dalal, once she had secured the flier. The ramp folded up behind her, but the little vehicle was ready and waiting for their return.
    ‘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