Blue Remembered Earth (69 page)

Geoffrey was too stunned to answer immediately. ‘The charges,’ he said, when he could push a clear thought into his head. ‘Tell me where they are.’

‘You’re not listening. It doesn’t matter now. You need to leave.’

‘Until we know what that countdown means, I’m not going to assume anything. Where are the charges?’

Hector groaned, as if all this was an insuperable nuisance. ‘To the rear, next to the last bulkhead before the engine section. That’s as close as I could get. I assumed it would be sufficient.’

‘Maybe I should work on getting you out of that seat first.’

Hector rolled his eyes. ‘With the heavy cutting equipment you happened to bring with you?’

‘There’s got to be something I can use somewhere on the ship.’

‘Good luck finding it in . . . less than four minutes.’

Geoffrey pushed himself away. He left the command deck, working his way back down the ship as quickly as his limbs allowed. The doors opened for him, all the way back to the point where’d he’d come in. Through a small porthole he saw the centrifuge arms, still wheeling around. Hector was being optimistic, he thought. Even with four minutes, it would have been a stretch to reach space and safe distance before
Winter Queen
’s countdown touched zero. He doubted that he even had time to escape the demolition charges.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

He pushed deeper into the ship, back towards the propulsion section, and at last found the devices. There were four of them, hooked into restraining straps on the wall just before the bulkhead. He slid one of the demolition charges out of its strap and studied the arming mechanism. It was set to the ninety-minute delay, but there was no means of determining how much time was left on the clock.

Geoffrey twisted the dial back to its safety setting, felt a click, and lowered the flip-up arming toggle. He repeated the procedure on the other three devices, then unzipped the top of his spacesuit inner-layer and stuffed the charges against his chest, metal to skin. Then he zipped up again, as well as he could. Hector must have had to do something similar to get the bombs aboard the ship in the first place.

Geoffrey made his way back to the command deck. He was still sweating, still struggling to catch his breath.

‘How much time left?’

‘I told you to leave!’ Hector shouted. ‘We’re down to less than a minute!’

The clock confirmed forty seconds remaining, thirty-nine, thirty-eight . . .

‘I disarmed the fuses.’

‘What do you want, a gold star?’

‘I thought you might like to know.’

‘You should have left, cousin.’ The fight had slumped out of Hector. ‘It’s too late now.’

Geoffrey tugged the charges out of his suit and stuffed them into a nylon tie-bag fixed to the wall near the entrance. He re-zipped his suit then eased into the command seat to Hector’s left.

‘What are you doing?’ Hector asked.

‘The ship wanted you in that seat for a reason. If Eunice meant to just kill you and blow up the ship, there are less melodramatic ways she could have made that happen.’ Geoffrey buckled in, adjusted the chest webbing, then positioned his hands on the seat rests. Cuffs whirred out and locked him in place, as they’d done with Hector. He felt a momentary pinprick in both wrists. Something was sampling him, tasting his blood.

Fifteen seconds on the clock. Ten. He watched the last digit whirr down to zero.

‘You didn’t have to come back for me,’ Hector said.

‘What would you have done were the situation reversed?’

‘I’m not really sure.’

Geoffrey heard a sound like distant drums beating a military tattoo. He glanced at his cousin. ‘Those sound like explosions.’

‘But we’re still here. If the power plant was going to blow . . . I think we’d already know it.’ Hector looked to Geoffrey for confirmation. ‘Wouldn’t we?’

‘I’m a biologist, not a ship designer.’ He paused. ‘But I think you’re right.’

The detonations were continuing. He heard the sound, and through his seat he felt something of the shockwave of each explosion as it transmitted through the ship. But it didn’t feel as if it was the ship itself that was breaking up.

Geoffrey looked around. The dance of readouts had calmed down. Before him floated a schematic of the entire ship, cut through like a blueprint, with flashing colour blocks and oozing flow lines showing fuel and coolant circulation. Most of the activity appeared to be going on around the propulsion assembly. On other screens, the trajectory simulations were stabilising around one possibility. He saw their future path arc away from Lunar orbit, away from the Earth–Moon system, slingshotting far across the ecliptic.

‘We’re getting ready to leave,’ Geoffrey said, unsure whether to be awed or terrified by this prospect. ‘
Winter Queen
is powering up. Those explosions . . . I think it’s the station, dismantling itself around us. Freeing the ship.’

‘I’ve got some news for you,’ Hector said. ‘This isn’t
Winter Queen
.’

The explosions had doubled in intensity and frequency, now resembling cannon fire. Eight massive explosions shook the ship violently, followed a few moments later by eight more. One fusillade came from the front, the other from the rear. On one of the schematics, Geoffrey observed that the aerobrake and drive shield were decoupling from their anchorpoints in the habitat’s leading and trailing ends. The ship was now floating free, cocooned in the remains of the Winter Palace.

He felt weight. His seat was pushing into his back. Half a gee at least, he guessed – maybe more. The ship clattered and banged. Moving forward, beginning to accelerate, the armoured piston of the aerobrake would be bearing the brunt of any impacts she suffered against the ruins of the habitat.

‘If this isn’t the
Winter Queen
. . .’ he said, leaving the statement unfinished.

‘By the time I planted the charges,’ Hector said, grimacing as the acceleration notched even higher, ‘I’d already seen the state of this ship and the rest of the habitat. You think I didn’t have questions by that point?’ He clenched his fists, his wrists jutting from the restraining cuffs. ‘I had to know, Geoffrey. There was still time to look into the system files. Maybe I’d stumble on a destruct option as well, save myself the worry of those charges not doing their job. So I came in here and sat in this seat, only expecting to be here a few minutes.’

‘That’s when the seat imprisoned you?’

‘No . . . I consented to this.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I had immediate access to the top-layer files. It’s an old system, but easy enough to navigate. At first, it was more than willing to let me have access.’

‘And then?’

‘I hit a point where it wouldn’t let me go any further. Detailed construction history, navigation logs . . . all that was blocked. No time to look for workarounds. But the ship said I could have access to everything I wished, provided I proved that I was Akinya. I didn’t question it. Why wouldn’t the ship want to know that I was family before giving me its deepest secrets?’

‘So you let the cuffs close around you.’

‘I had to buckle in first: the blood-sampling system wouldn’t activate until I was secured. That was foolish . . . but I didn’t have time to sit and weigh the options. I wanted to know, very badly. And I assumed the ship would take a drop and release me again.’

The acceleration had been rising steadily ever since their departure, and it was a long time since Geoffrey had felt the ship crash into anything. Whatever remained of the Winter Palace, they must have left it far behind by now. He hoped that Jumai had got to safety, and that the Pans had managed to undock their ship in time.

‘How did you call for help?’

‘Still had a comm-link to my suit, and my suit could still get a signal to the
Kinyeti
.’

‘You didn’t tell Dos Santos much.’

‘I told him I needed help. I knew he’d come as quickly as possible. There was still time to get me out.’

‘After the ship had taken the blood sample . . . did it keep its word?’

‘Yes,’ Hector said. ‘That’s how I found out that this isn’t
Winter Queen.
It’s . . . something else. I found the construction history. This ship is sixty-two years old. It was built in 2100, when Eunice was off on her final mission.
Winter Queen
was a good twenty years older than that.’

Geoffrey nodded to himself, thinking that he understood Hector’s error. ‘Something happened out there, that’s all. Her previous flight logs got wiped somehow, and everything was reset to zero.’

Hector sighed. ‘All the files cross-matched. Nothing had been erased or lost. This ship only ever made one trip. It was built in deep space, and it came back to Lunar orbit, where it’s been ever since. Box-fresh.’

‘What do you mean, built in deep space?’

‘Unless the files are lying . . . this ship was manufactured on one of our Kuiper belt assets. A dormant comet, orbiting beyond Neptune.’

‘You make igloos out of ice, Hector, not ships. I know that much.’

‘I realise this is painful for you, Geoffrey, getting up to speed with what your own family has been doing for the last hundred years.
Of course
you can’t make anything out of ice and dirt: that’s not why we went to the Kuiper belt, nor why we spent a fortune planting flags all over anything bigger than a potato. We mine those iceteroids for what they can give us: water, volatiles, hydrocarbons. We send robots and raw materials out there and they build mining and on-site refining facilities, and then they package the processed material and catapult it back to us on energy-efficient trajectories. The robots and raw materials come from our facilities on the main belt M-class asteroids, where the metals are. It’s a supply chain. Can you grasp that?’

‘You still haven’t told me how a ship could originate on a comet.’

‘There are metals and assembly facilities in the Kuiper belt. We put them there, to mine the volatiles. Thousands of tonnes of complex self-repairing machinery, serviced by Plexus machines – even more tonnage. And that infrastructure was already in place by 2100, already earning back our investment.’

‘You’re saying it could have been reassigned to make a ship?’

‘Saying it’s possible, that’s all. Maybe illegal – there’d have been any number of patent violations, unless our subcontractors were somehow in the know – but it could have been done. If Eunice wanted to build a copy of her ship, she had the means. All she would have needed were raw materials and time.’

Geoffrey closed his eyes. It wasn’t just the steadily mounting gee-load, although that was a part of it. He needed to think. If they were on VASIMR propulsion now, the power plant was surely being pushed to its limit. He remembered how leisurely the departure of Sunday’s swiftship had appeared.

‘And secrecy,’ he said.

‘She had it. The Kuiper belt’s a long way out, and it’s not like anyone else was living anywhere near that asset.’

‘Want to hazard a guess as to where we’re headed?’

Hector looked at the trajectory display, but it was clear that he’d already digested the salient details. ‘If that’s to be believed, then we’re going a long way out.’

‘Maybe back to the ship’s point of origin?’

‘If I could get out of these restraints, maybe I could query the ship.’

Geoffrey struggled against his own cuffs, but they were still holding him tight. ‘We’re safe now, though,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘The ship clearly wanted to make sure one or both of us was family, so it had to test our blood. It may also have wanted to cushion us during the escape phase. But that’s over – so why would it insist on holding us here now?’

‘Is that a rhetorical question, cousin?’

‘Release me,’ Geoffrey said.

The cuffs relinquished their hold, as did the ankle restraints. He was still buckled into the seat, and while the ship was under acceleration it might make sense to stay that way, but he was no longer a prisoner of the chair.

‘You just had to ask nicely.’

Hector clenched his fists again, made one final attempt to break the restraints by force, then said, ‘Release me.’

The ship let him go. Hector stretched his arms, holding them out from his body against the acceleration. Geoffrey remembered that his cousin had been confined to the chair for a lot longer than he had, and had spent much of that interval expecting to die. For the first time in a very long while he felt a dim flicker of empathy.

They were blood, after all.

‘I guess the next thing is to tell it to stop and let us off.’

Hector strained forward. ‘This is Hector Akinya. Acknowledge command authority.’

‘Welcome, Hector Akinya,’ the ship said, speaking in what Geoffrey recognised as the voice of Memphis, or one very close to it. ‘Welcome, Geoffrey Akinya.’

‘Stop engines,’ Hector said, in the tones of one who was used to getting his way. ‘Immediately. Return us to Lunar orbit.’

‘Propulsion and navigation control are currently suspended, Hector.’

Geoffrey issued the same command, was met by the same polite but firm rebuttal. It was irksome to have Memphis speaking back, as if the ship failed to grasp that mimicking the voice of a recently dead man was an act of grave tactlessness.