Blue Remembered Earth

‘Probably,’ Sunday echoed once more.

‘It can’t know what we’re doing here,’ Dorcas said. ‘It can’t know, and even if it did, it wouldn’t be interested. I told you, it’s like a city-state. We’re nothing to it.’

Sunday watched the drill bite deeper, its progress plain to the naked eye – it had reached at least a metre into the ground, perhaps more. That there was something down there was now beyond doubt. The radar and seismic profiles had improved since Dorcas’s first detection, and now revealed what appeared to be a purposefully buried box, not so very different in size and proportions from the container Chama had uncovered on the Moon. A rectangular shaft must have been excavated, the box lowered into it lengthwise and the waste material dropped back over it, before being tamped down. With better equipment, they might even have been able to peer inside the box without bringing it to the surface. Not that it mattered: they’d have the thing in their hands before very long. Gribelin was digging a circular shaft slightly wider than the original bore, and he would stop short of the item itself, for fear of damaging it or triggering some destruct mechanism or booby trap. To be sure, they would send in the proxy Gribelin carried attached to the front of his vehicle.

‘When do we hit it?’ she asked.

Gribelin stared at the drill for a long while before answering. ‘Sixty, seventy minutes.’

‘When I asked you before, you said it wouldn’t take more than an hour.’

‘I said it wouldn’t take much more,’ he snapped back at her.

‘Golem’s fifty kays out,’ Dorcas said levelly. ‘If the hammerheads are going to do anything, we’ll know about it soon enough. Maybe luck’s on your golem’s side.’

‘If we didn’t have to drill here, maybe we could drive out and meet the golem halfway,’ Jitendra said, stamping his feet nervously, as if the cold was starting to reach him through the insulation of his suit.

‘And then what?’ Dorcas asked. ‘Use reasoned persuasion?’

‘I was thinking more along the lines of a reasoned kick in the teeth.’

‘There’s no Mech to stop you, but you’d still be in a world of trouble once news got back to the Surveilled World. And we don’t know that the golem doesn’t have a human or warmblood guide with it.’ Dorcas nodded at the whirring drill. ‘We’ll see this through to the bitter end. It’s not as if it’s likely to be anything worth fighting over.’

‘You still don’t believe we’ll find anything,’ Sunday said.

‘If that box has been down there for a hundred years,’ Dorcas said, ‘then everything I know about the Evolvarium is wrong. And I’m afraid that’s just not the way my world works.’

‘Much as it pains me to agree with the good captain,’ Gribelin said, ‘she does have a point.’

There had been days that seemed to pass more rapidly than that hour. Watching the drill was like watching a kettle. Eventually Sunday gave up and walked away from the site, as far as she dared. Even when she was two hundred metres from the truck, she could still feel the vibrations from Gribelin’s equipment. Other than the rock plume, the sky was clear and cloudless, darkening almost to a subtle purple-black at the zenith. Pavonis Mons was a gentle bulge on the horizon – underwhelming, or would have been were she naive enough to have expected anything more spectacular. She was already on its footslopes. The mountains of Mars were simply too big to see in one go, unless one was in space.

Give her Kilimanjaro any day. At least that was a mountain you could point to.

The vibration stopped. She looked back just in time to see the plume attenuate, the last part of it bannering through the sky like a kite’s tail. She watched Gribelin push the drill back out of the way, nothing in his unhurried movements suggesting that there’d been a fault with the machinery.

She walked back to the drill site. By the time she got there, Jitendra and Dorcas were leaning at the edge of the fresh hole, hands on knees as they peered into its depths.

‘The good news,’ Dorcas said, ‘is that one of the hammerheads took the bait.’

‘And?’

‘It wasn’t a clean kill. The vehicle is still approaching, although not as quickly as before. But it’s damaged, and the other hammerhead may be taking an interest.’

‘Will there be repercussions?’

‘Reprisals? Probably not. Your golem resumed movement before sun-up, which is asking for trouble in anyone’s book.’

‘I hope no one else was hurt.’

‘Their fault if they were,’ Dorcas said.

Sunday took care as she neared the freshly dug hole. It was only about sixty centimetres across, but easily wide enough to become wedged in if she lost her footing.

‘About this much to go,’ Gribelin said, spreading his hands the width of a football. ‘We’ll back off and let the proxy dig out the rest.’

‘Sifters,’ Sibyl said, pointing to two pink plumes on the horizon, sailing slowly from left to right like the smoke from an Old-World ocean liner. ‘We’d best not hang around.’

The truck and the airship backed off a couple of hundred metres. Gribelin’s robot had detached itself from the prow of his vehicle and was now striding across the open terrain. Gribelin had gone into ching bind, otherwise immobile as he drove the proxy to the edge of the hole. It was the same kind of skeletal, minimalist unit that Sunday had chinged on the Moon, constructed from numerous tubes and pistons. It squeezed into the hole effortlessly, folding itself into a tight little knot like a dried-up spider, and vanished down the shaft. A few moments later, gobbets of rubble began to pop out of the opening. If there’s a booby trap, Sunday thought, we’d best all pray it isn’t nuclear.

But after a few minutes’ further excavation, the proxy had unearthed the box. Deeming it to be safe, at least for the moment, Sunday returned to the shaft and looked down. The proxy had extricated itself, allowing her a clear view of the object. About two-thirds of the upright container had been exposed, revealing it to be of dull, anonymous-looking construction. The size of a picnic hamper, the grey alloy casing was scratched and slightly dented. Sunday made out the seam of a lid, and what appeared to be a pair of simple catches in the long side.

She nodded at Gribelin. ‘Bring it all the way out.’

They retreated again and waited for the proxy to haul the box from the shaft and deposit it on the ground lengthwise, with the lid facing the sky. In all the red emptiness of Mars, it looked like something painted by Salvador Dali: a tombstone in a desert, maybe.

Sunday was the first to reach it. She sent the proxy away, not willing to let anyone else open the lid now that she had come this far. Different on the Moon, when Chama had been the one who had that privilege. Then, she’d barely known what she was getting involved with. Now it was as personal as anything in her universe.

Sunday knelt next to the box. Jitendra was behind her, but the others were still keeping their distance. Let them, she thought as she worked her gloved fingers under the catches and applied pressure. They flipped open obligingly, and Sunday had her first real inkling of disquiet. She’d never been entirely persuaded by Dorcas’s argument that a box could not have been under the surface all this time and not be found by the machines. But catches that had been snapped shut sixty or more years ago and then exposed to six decades of Martian cold ought to feel tighter than these.

The lid swung open just as easily. It was only then that Sunday realised she should have considered the possibility that the box had been packed and sealed under normal pressure conditions rather than in the thin air on the face of Mars.

Too late . . . But no: it either hadn’t been pressure-sealed, or the air had leaked away over the decades.

She looked inside. The box contained another box: a lacquered black receptacle with a flower pattern worked into its lid. There was just enough room around the outside of the smaller box to get her fingers in. She reached for it.

And felt something touch the back of her head.

‘It’s not a weapon,’ Dorcas said. ‘We need to be clear about that. I am not holding a weapon against your helmet. I would never do that. What I am doing is holding a non-weapon, a tool, a normal part of our equipment, in such a way that harm could conceivably come to you if I were careless. Which I won’t be, provided you do nothing that might . . . distract me.’

Sunday was surprised by how calm her own voice sounded. ‘What would you like me to do, Dorcas?’

‘I’d like you to let go of that box, the smaller one, and step away from the big box. I’m right behind you, and I’m going to stay right behind you.’

Sunday removed her fingers from the gap between the boxes. She’d budged the small box just enough to feel that it was light, if not empty.

‘I don’t understand what’s going on,’ she said, standing and moving away from the box as she’d been told to. ‘Other than the fact that it feels criminal.’

‘Not at all,’ Dorcas said. ‘Quite the opposite, really. I’m intervening to prevent the execution of a criminal act. In the absence of an effective Mechanism, I’m obliged to do so. Now kneel again.’

‘If there was a Mechanism,’ Sunday answered, lowering down as she’d been ordered, ‘I doubt very much whether you’d be holding something against the back of my helmet.’

‘That’s as may be. But as I said, what we’re trying to do here is stop a crime, not create one.’

‘The crime being . . . ?’

‘The removal of artefacts from the Evolvarium without the necessary authorisation. I’m afraid everything here that isn’t geology belongs to the Overfloater Consortium. You should have realised that before you came blundering in.’

From her kneeling position Sunday looked around slowly, careful not make any sudden movements. She had walked perhaps twenty paces from the big box when Dorcas ordered her to kneel again. The woman was still behind her. Sibyl, the other Overfloater, was holding a kind of pneumatic drill, double-gripped like a gangster-era machine gun. It was heavy and green and wrapped in a gristle of cabling. Gribelin and Jitendra were kneeling on the ground before her, their hands raised as high as their suit articulation allowed.

‘Piton-drivers,’ Dorcas said. ‘We use them to fire anchors into the ground when we need to moor-up during a storm. They use compressed air to drive self-locking cleats fifty centimetres into solid rock. Just think what that would do to common-or-garden suit armour.’

‘I didn’t come to steal from the Overfloaters. You know why I’m here. Whatever’s in that box is family property, that’s all, and it was buried here before the Evolvarium was created. It’s got nothing to do with you or your machines. If I take it, nothing changes. No one gets richer or poorer.’

‘If that’s the case,’ Dorcas said, ‘then you won’t mind if I have it instead, will you?’

‘I said it belongs to me, to my family.’

‘Can you prove this?’

‘Of course. I didn’t end up here by accident. I followed clues, all the way from the Moon.’

‘Then you can submit a claim for return of confiscated property through the usual channels.’ Dorcas seemed to think for a moment. ‘Of course, to prove that you followed those clues, you’ll have to mention that incident with the Chinese, to which your name hasn’t hitherto been linked.’

‘Who’s behind this?’ Jitendra asked.

‘There’s no one “behind” anything,’ Dorcas said. ‘I’m merely asserting the rule of law.’

‘It’s just that you’d only know about what happened on the Moon if the Pans had told you,’ Jitendra said.

‘I’m not surprised,’ Sunday said. ‘If anything, I’m amazed it’s taken them this long.’

‘To do what?’ Gribelin asked.

‘To steal the box from under my nose. It’s been too easy, hasn’t it? They’ve been falling over themselves to help us get this far. Now they’ve decided: enough is enough. We don’t need Sunday to follow the rest of the clues. We can do that on our own, thanks very much, or just not bother.’ She shook her head, disgusted at her own unwillingness to see things clearly until this lacerating moment. ‘Soya warned me,’ she said.

‘Soya?’ Dorcas asked. ‘Who the hell is Soya?’

‘Someone I should have listened to when I had the chance. Not that it would have made much difference. How far could I have got, without the Pans’ assistance?’

‘Maybe I’m missing something,’ Gribelin said, ‘but if the Pans are paying me, why is this shit happening?’

‘Let’s not allow this to come between us, Grib,’ Dorcas said soothingly. ‘We’re both too old for that. You’ve done an honest job and you’ve been paid for it. You had no right to assist in the extraction of materials from the Evolvarium, so you could say that you’re getting off very lightly by being interdicted before the crime could be fully actualised.’

‘I told you what we had in mind. You said nothing about stealing the fucking box from me at the last minute.’

‘Yes, well, that was before I was fully cognisant of the possibilities.’

‘When did they contact you?’ Sunday asked. ‘Was it yesterday, after we’d been brought aboard? Was that why you delayed the dig, when we still had daylight to spare? So you could haggle terms with the Pans?’

‘She’s not going to admit to them being behind this,’ Jitendra said.

‘No,’ Sunday said. ‘You’re right. But I thought they could be trusted – to a point, at least. I trusted Chama and Gleb. I even trusted Holroyd. And if they’re screwing me over, what are they doing to my brother?’

‘I very much doubt that Chama and Gleb had anything to do with this,’ Jitendra said.

On an open channel, obviously not caring that her words would be heard by everyone present, Dorcas said, ‘The box is secure. Send down two more crew to pick us up and start prepping for departure. I want to be out of here before the golem leads the hammerheads to us.’

‘May be a bit late for that,’ Gribelin said, angling his helmet to nod eastwards. Still kneeling, Sunday twisted to look as well, keeping her movements smooth and slow. She made out a plume of dust, a bumbling silver glint at the point where it met the ground.

Dorcas cursed, some Martian oath that the translation layer couldn’t parse. ‘I was meant to be alerted!’

‘Nine kays and closing,’ Sibyl said. ‘There’s still time, if we hurry.’

Dorcas prodded Sunday. ‘Get up.’

‘Make your mind up. You just told me to kneel down.’

This time the prod was harder, enough to rattle Sunday’s head against the inside of her helmet. ‘I won’t ask again. Remember, bad things happen out here. No one’s going to bat so much as an eyelid if you don’t show up in Vishniac again. They went into the Evolvarium without an official escort – what were they expecting?’

Sunday rose. ‘Whatever you think you’re doing, understand this. You’re not just stealing this box from me. You’re stealing the corporate property of Akinya Space. Are you really sure you want to make an enemy of us?’

‘Tell that to Lin Wei. I seem to remember Akinya Space stuck the knife in her business, all those years ago.’ A prod, less violent this time. ‘Now walk. All of you. Go as far as that ridge, and keep close to each other.’

Sunday pushed any thoughts of grand heroics out of her mind. She wasn’t going to take a chance against the piton-driver, not when Dorcas was only a few paces behind her. The three of them did as they were instructed, leaving Sibyl free to retrieve the smaller box. Turning to look back while she walked, Sunday watched the other woman extract the lacquered box from the larger container without incident. She held it up to her visor and with one gloved hand eased up the patterned lid.

Sibyl examined the contents for a few seconds, poking a finger into whatever was inside, then closed the lid carefully. There was no way of telling what she’d seen.

‘Keep walking,’ Dorcas said.

Despite the order, Gribelin stopped and pointed. ‘Hammerhead!’ he bellowed, like a whaler sighting a spout.

‘Move!’ Dorcas snarled.

The hammerhead was some distance beyond the golem’s rover, but it was rearing up now, assuming full and dreadful aspect. Sunday’s visor graphed up a high-mag zoom, sensing her focus. A down-angled claw hammer, big as the rover itself, pivoted on the head-end of a mechanical spine as long as a train. The machine cut through the terrain in an S-wave, each of its house-sized spinal modules equipped with out-jutting legs, sinuous and in constant whipping motion. The golem was travelling quickly, kicking dust back at its pursuer, but the hammerhead looked to be gaining. They watched it scoop up boulders and fling them through the air, raining down on the golem with ballistic precision.

Sunday had been running from the golem from the moment it had announced itself in Crommelin, but now she welcomed its arrival. Given the alternative, she would far rather deal with Lucas than Dorcas and the Pans. Watching the hammerhead close the distance on the rover, she willed the golem forward.

It wasn’t enough. A car-sized boulder spun through the air, barely missing the rover and landing slightly ahead of it. The rover bludgeoned into the obstacle, its nose digging down as its tail flipped up. Wheels spun in the air. The rover, its front end crumpled, fell onto its side. The hammerhead continued throwing rocks as it approached.

Sunday tore her gaze away from the spectacle long enough to see the airship reaching down its arms to scoop up Dorcas and Sibyl. It hauled them into the sky, along with their improvised weapons and the black box.

‘Good luck!’ Dorcas said over the suit-to-suit channel. ‘We’ll do what we can to push that hammerhead away, but I wouldn’t stick around if I were you.’ She let her piton-gun fall to the dust. ‘I’ll buy you a drink next time we’re both in Vishniac, Grib.’

The gondola’s airlock was open: another crewperson was waiting to receive Dorcas and Sibyl. The airship’s engines swivelled on their mountings, the deltoid gasbag turning with the ponderousness of a cloud. Gribelin looked dumbstruck. He was hurrying back to the truck, kicking dust with his heels. He paused to scoop up the piton-gun, shaking the dirt from its workings. Sunday and Jitendra started after him.

But she couldn’t not look at the golem. The hammerhead was on it now, rearing above the crashed rover. It swung back its head, angling it as far as the hinge allowed, then swung the hammer down, putting its entire body into the movement so that it looked, for an instant, as if the robot were no more than a whip being cracked. The hammer drove down onto the rover. The head angled back, swung again. The rover was being crushed and pulverised. Sunday thought of the golem inside, what must now be left of it. She hoped it had come alone.

They had reached the truck. The hammerhead had smashed the other vehicle six or seven times now. Bits of it had broken off, and now the Evolvarium machine was employing its cilia-like legs to pick through the debris. There was something obscene and avaricious about the haste with which it went about the task of recycling the broken machine, shovelling the prime cuts into a ring-shaped aperture just under its hinge-point. A horror of counterrotating teeth spun at high speed inside the maw, grinding and slicing.

Gribelin hauled himself onto the side of his truck. He looked back, still holding the piton-gun, and then switched his attention to the hammerhead. Sunday looked at it as well. It was still next to the wreck, but it had interrupted its feeding. The ‘head’ was swivelling slowly around, like a battleship turret moving onto its next target.

‘It knows we’re here,’ Gribelin said.

‘Then we’d better do what Dorcas just said,’ Sunday answered. ‘Get the fuck out of here.’

‘Lucas couldn’t outrun it, could he?’ Jitendra asked, fear breaking his voice. ‘What hope have we got?’

‘Maybe Dorcas can scare it away,’ Sunday said. Instead of heading towards the hammerhead, however, the airship was moving in the opposite direction.

‘And maybe I trust Dorcas about as far as I can piss, right now,’ Gribelin said. Through his visor, the set of his face was grim and calculating. He glanced at the hammerhead again, then his truck, then Sunday and Jitendra.

‘Run,’ he said.

Sunday frowned. ‘What do you mean—’

‘Run,’ he repeated, lowering the muzzle of the piton-gun in her direction to dispel any remaining doubt. ‘Run, sweet cheeks, and keep running. Hammerheads lock on to the biggest target they can find, and they’re smart enough to go after a machine rather than a person in a suit. Until the machine escapes, or they catch it. Whichever happens first.’

Sunday wasn’t processing. All she was seeing was a man pointing a non-weapon at her, blocking her access to the one thing that stood even a remote chance of outrunning the Evolvarium creature. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Let us in.’

From his position on the truck’s side, Gribelin kicked hard. His boot caught her in the middle of her chest. She crashed back, falling against Jitendra, who stumbled and flailed before finding his balance. ‘Gribelin!’ he called. ‘You can’t do this!’

‘Run,’ Gribelin said again. He was in the truck now, venting its cabin air in a single explosive gasp so that he didn’t have to go through the airlock cycle. Still on her back, Sunday watched him settle into the control position and work the levers. The stabilising legs spidered away. The wheels churned, found their grip.

‘He’s abandoning us,’ Jitendra said.

‘I’m not so sure,’ Sunday replied as the truck backed away and turned. She rolled onto her side and forced herself up. She remembered what Gribelin had told her, that they should do exactly what he said if the shit came down. This predicament, she decided, adequately satisfied the requirements. ‘But I do think we should run.’

So they ran, as fast as the suits allowed, which was nowhere near as fast as she would have liked, and maybe a fifth of the speed of Gribelin’s rover, now scudding away from them with a huge peacock’s tail of dust behind it.

‘It’s taking the bait,’ Jitendra said, between ragged breaths. Sunday barely had breath herself. They were pushing the suits to their limit, their own lungs and muscles doing at least as much work as the suits’ servos.

‘Keep moving,’ she said.

But she couldn’t resist a look back. The hammerhead had abandoned its first kill. Now it was going after Gribelin, but not with any sense of urgency. Conserving its energy, knowing that it could catch him up in patient increments, over kilometres. She forced herself to keep running, or to maintain what was now little more than an exhausted shambling jog. She was starting to feel light-headed, with stars spangling the edges of her vision. The faceplate readouts were all in the red, warning her that she was pushing the suit beyond its recommended performance envelope.

Never mind the suit, she thought. This is pretty far outside my own performance envelope.

There’d been no stated intention, no agreement between them that they should run in a certain direction, other than away from the truck. But that had been sufficient shared volition, Sunday realised now, to send them towards the golem’s wreck. It had looked awfully far away, but distances on Mars were deceptive. She crested a shallow ridge, and with a dreamlike lurch of contracting perspectives it was suddenly much closer.

It looked bad, too. She’d never had any real expectation that the attack had been survivable, but any hopes she might have entertained were now obliterated. The rover was in pieces. It had been ripped apart and pounded into mangled and flattened shapes, now barely recognisable as the vehicle parts they had once been. She thought of Dali again: of sagging watches draped over leafless branches. The Evolvarium creature had turned the rover into art.

The suit’s warning alerts were now more than she could endure, and her own heart felt like a piece of machinery about to burst from her chest. Her lungs felt as if the sun had been poured into them. She could not keep running.

Lucas’s proxy lay on the ground.

The golem had no need of a surface suit, and was dressed as it had been in the Red Menace. For an instant her eyes tricked her, telling her that half of it must be buried under dust, until she realised that half of it was missing. The golem consisted of a head, an upper torso, one left arm. Lucas’s proxy body had been severed in a diagonal line from the upper-right shoulder to the left hip. Sunday could not see the rest of it. Perhaps the other parts were in the remains of the rover, or scattered, or had already been digested by the Evolvarium creature.

It was the first time she’d seen the inner workings of a golem. There were glutinous layers, sheaths of active polymer, a skeletal structure of translucent white plastic, fibrous bundles of nerves and power-transmission circuits. A blue-grey blubber of artificial muscles, precisely veined with fluid ducting. Not much metal, and very little in the way of hard mechanisms. Purple ichor, some kind of lubrication or coolant medium, had spilt out of it and was already freezing on the Tharsis ground. The right side of its face was mashed in, the ear and scalp missing. An eyeball lolled out of its socket, trailing a rope of greasy fibre optics. The golem’s intelligence, in so far as it had any, was distributed throughout its entire anatomy. But the eyes were still its primary visual acquisition system.

She stood next to it, hands on knees, waiting for the fog of exhaustion to clear from her vision.

The golem looked at her. The good eyeball tracked her in its socket, the other one twitching like a fish on land. The mouth moved, clicking open and shut in the manner of a ventriloquist’s dummy, as if operated by a crude mechanism. For the moment, there was no animation in the face. It was like a limp rubber mask with no person wearing it, sagging in the wrong places. Then Lucas seemed to push through, his personality inhabiting the golem. The face tautened, filled out, and the mouth formed a smile.

‘I’m in trouble,’ Sunday said over the suit’s general comm channel. ‘I can’t reach the aug, and aside from my brother and some people I don’t trust any more, no one knows I’m here. That leaves you, Lucas. And I don’t even know if you’re hearing this, or if you still have a ching bind back to Earth.’

The golem spoke. She heard it in her head. ‘I think we’re both in trouble, Sunday.’

‘When was the last time you received an update from Lucas?’

‘I’ve been autonomous for hours now. I’m afraid it’s highly unlikely that there’ll be any re-establishment of contact, at least not before I become inoperable.’

‘Is Lucas aware of my whereabouts?’

‘Lucas knows that I followed you into the Evolvarium, and that your probable target was Eunice’s landing site. However, he didn’t know that for a fact.’

Sunday looked around. Gribelin and the hammerhead were a long way off now: from this distance, she couldn’t see much more than the rover’s dust plume. She hoped Gribelin was still maintaining his lead.

Jitendra staggered to a halt, bracing his hands on his hips. He saw the golem, shuddered instinctively. It was a natural reaction. It looked so plausible, so lifelike.

‘It should never have come to this, cousin,’ Sunday said, with genuine sorrow.

The golem’s one good eye twinkled with bitter-sweet amusement. ‘I was always prepared to put the family before my personal advancement. It’s just a shame you didn’t feel the same way. What have you gained, though? They took the item. You came all this way for nothing.’ The face smiled. Purple ichor drooled from its lips. ‘You wasted everything, Sunday.’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’ She planted a foot on the golem’s skull. ‘There are always compensations.’

She felt the plastic crack wetly under her weight, like some large, brittle, yolk-filled egg. The pettiness of the gesture sickened her to the marrow. There was spite in her that she had never once suspected.

But at the same time she did not regret it at all.

Jitendra had been digging through the wreckage of the rover, the parts that hadn’t been completely pancaked, for many hours now. He was looking for something, anything, that might enable them to send a distress signal. Sunday had helped, at first, but then the futility of the exercise had burst over her in a wave of bleak despair. He would not find anything of use, nor would they succeed in contacting anyone who could help. If they tried to walk, they’d still be inside the Evolvarium when night returned, and their suits would certainly not keep them alive for more than a couple of days. It was already long past noon and the sun was hurtling back down towards the horizon with indecent haste.

‘I don’t think we should stay here,’ she said, for the third or fourth time. ‘If the hammerhead comes back to take another look at the wreck . . .’

On the other hand, by remaining close to the wreckage of the rover they might be less conspicuous than two figures out in the landscape, far from any other manufactured thing. Did the machines hunt by heat or sound, primarily? And was there sense in staying close to the drill site, in the faint hope that the golem had managed to report home? She might have spurned the family, but they wouldn’t let her die out here. Not knowingly, she hoped.

Gribelin was dead. She was certain of this now. Almost at the point when the dust plume faded into the pink haze of distance above the horizon, there had been a bright and soundless explosion. She had felt the report of it seconds later, rumbling through the ground like elephant talk. She imagined him allowing the hammerhead to come as close to the rover as he dared, before triggering something aboard the vehicle: a cache of explosives, some illegal weapon. Whether it had been enough to destroy the hammerhead, or merely to exclude the possibility of its catching Gribelin alive, there was no way of telling. A bonsai mushroom cloud had curled up, a brain rising swollen and cerebral from its own spinal cord, and there had been no sign of the hammerhead after that.

But the hammerhead was not even an apex predator.

‘I want Eunice,’ Sunday said. ‘She’d know what to do. She always knew what to do.’

Jitendra kicked aside a buckled metal plate. ‘There’s nothing here we can use. And I’m not even sure it’s a good idea to keep communicating like this. Maybe we should go into radio silence from now on.’ He paused, his breath ragged from the exertion of searching the wreck. That was Jitendra’s way of coping, Sunday thought: keep busy, until even he had no option but to admit the futility of it. ‘So, which direction do we walk? The winds haven’t been too bad since we came in. If our air recyclers hold out we can probably follow the vehicle tracks all the way back to Vishniac, even if we lose suit nav.’

If they lost suit nav, Sunday thought, getting lost would be the least of their worries. It would mean the suits were dying on them, and that life support would be among the failing systems. ‘Maybe another Overfloater will take pity on us.’

‘Yes. They do appear to be the kind and considerate sort, based on Dorcas’s example.’

‘I’m just saying. When you’re out of options, you cling to the unrealistic.’ But Sunday had been searching the sky for hours. There were no other airships up there. ‘I could kill her. Better than that. I will kill her, if I ever get the chance.’

Which I won’t, a quiet voice added.

‘I don’t think she meant us to die. On the other hand, I don’t think she thought things through particularly well.’

‘Do me a favour,’ Sunday said. ‘Can you – just for once – stop trying to look on the bright side all the fucking time? And stop trying to always see the good in everyone, because sometimes it just isn’t there. Sometimes people are just arseholes. Evil fucking arseholes.’

Jitendra dragged a piece of rover panelling next to Sunday and jammed it into the ground like a windbreak. ‘We’re going to be the hottest things for miles around. The more thermal screening we can arrange, the better our chances.’

‘Our chances are zero, Jitendra. But if it makes you feel better . . .’ She blinked hard. Her eyes stung with tears, but there was nothing she could do about that now.

‘It would make me feel better if you helped a bit,’ he said. ‘Some of these pieces are too big for me to manage on my own.’

Anything to please Jitendra. And he was right. Better to be doing something. Better to be doing something, no matter how stupid and pointless, than nothing at all.

While the universe surveyed their ramshackle plans and laughed.

They made a crude shelter, open to the skies but offering some cover from anything approaching on or near the ground. Sunday doubted that it would make much difference – their heat was going to bleed out whatever they did – but if it made them slightly less visible then she supposed the effort was not entirely wasted. They had depleted some more of their suits’ power and oxygen, but they had not surrendered. And when the work was done, the shelter fashioned to the best of their abilities and the sun lower still, they sat next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, maintaining tactile contact so they could talk.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sunday said finally.

‘Sorry for being tricked and cheated?’

‘Sorry for what I got you into. Sorry for what I got Gribelin into.’

‘I’m sorry for him as well. But he was an old man, in a dangerous line of work. You didn’t kill him; his job did.’

‘Maybe we’d have been better staying together.’

‘We’re still alive,’ Jitendra said. He tightened his hand around hers in emphasis. ‘He isn’t. That has to be the better outcome, doesn’t it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sunday said, and the words surprised her because they seemed to come unbidden.

‘I do,’ Jitendra said. ‘And while there’s a second more of living to be had, I’ll always choose life over death. Because anything at all could happen in that second.’

‘Since when did you start believing in miracles?’ Sunday asked.

‘I don’t,’ he answered. ‘But I do believe in . . .’ Jitendra fell silent, long enough that she began to wonder if the tactile link had stopped working. She followed his line of sight, out through the narrow vertical gap where two of the wreck’s pieces didn’t quite meet.

‘Jitendra?’

‘I haven’t moved since we sat down,’ he said. ‘My line of sight’s still the same. And I definitely couldn’t see that hill an hour ago.’

Sunday adjusted her position and saw what he meant. She’d have seen it herself, had she been sitting a little to her left. It was no hill, she knew. The topography here was clear: other than the volcanoes and some ancient craters, there were no sharp protrusions in the terrain.

More than that, Jitendra was right. The hill hadn’t been there while they made the shelter.

‘The Aggregate,’ Sunday said, and when Jitendra didn’t answer, she knew it was because he had nothing better to offer.

And the Aggregate was coming closer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Geoffrey checked his restraints. The Quaynor was burning fuel again, continuing with orbital insertion and approach/rendezvous with the Winter Palace. Up in the forward command blister – the nearest thing the ship had to a bridge – Jumai and Mira Gilbert were tethered either side of him, secured within a messy cat’s cradle of bungee cords and buckle-on harnesses. The command blister was a metal-framed cupola set with impact-resistant glass and furnished with quaintly old-fashioned controls and readouts.

‘Your family are still ahead of us,’ Gilbert said, confirming the news that Geoffrey had been half-expecting. ‘We had some delta-vee in reserve. Unfortunately, so did the Kinyeti.’ She tapped at a fold-down instrument panel, muttering some dark aquatic oath. Reaction motors popped and stuttered, finessing the Quaynor’s course. ‘Going to be a nail-biter, I’m afraid. We’ll meet them on the same orbit. Unfortunately it looks like they’ll make dock before we do.’

‘How many docking slots?’ Jumai asked.

‘Close-ups show one at either pole. Anyone’s guess as to whether both are serviceable.’

‘Been a long while since there was any need for two ships to be docked at the same time,’ Geoffrey said. ‘If ever.’

The Quaynor wasn’t new – Geoffrey could tell that much just from the rank mustiness of his living quarters – but he doubted that it dated from much before the turn of the century. Rather it had been tailored to Pan ideological specifications, which dictated a strict minimum of aug-generated contrivances. Glass windows, so that the universe might be apprehended photon by photon, on its own blazing terms, rather than through layers of distorting mediation. Control and navigation systems that required physical interaction, so that a person had to be present, in body as well as mind. Decision-making abdicated to fallible, slow-witted human pilots, rather than suites of swift and tireless expert systems.

‘What are Hector and Lucas hoping to gain here?’ Jumai asked.

Geoffrey scratched a nugget of crystal-hard dust from his eye. The period of unconsciousness in the rocket hadn’t done anything to take the edge off his exhaustion.

‘The cousins couldn’t give two shits about what’s inside the Winter Palace. Not for themselves, anyway. They just don’t want me finding anything that might hurt Eunice’s reputation or endanger the business.’ He adjusted one of the restraints where it was starting to chafe. ‘They’ll be planning to scuttle it, one way or another. They already have the paperwork in place.’

Jumai asked, ‘Reckon they brought bombs with them?’

‘Plenty of stuff in a ship that can be used to make a bang,’ Gilbert said. ‘That’s before we even get to the fact that there’s a whole other ship stuck inside the Winter Palace.’

Geoffrey tensed at the arrival of a ching request. It was Hector, and the ching coordinates placed him near the Moon.

‘I don’t think we have much to say to each other,’ he said, opting to keep the conversation strictly voice-only.

‘You took the call,’ Hector said, his reply bouncing back from the Kinyeti almost immediately, ‘which suggests you think there’s something worth discussing.’

‘Is it just you, or did Lucas come along for the ride?’

‘Only room for one of us, Geoffrey – I came up in a cargo shot, not the crewed capsule. Stress wouldn’t have been good for Lucas, not after what he did to his leg.’ He emitted a brief, humourless laugh. ‘It was quite a trip. You should try it sometime.’

‘I did it once,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Not this way, with no cushioning and the safety margins dialled to zero. The kick when I hit the bend at the base of the mountain . . . that was something. The view, though . . . once the pusher lasers had me and I was sailing into orbit. Glorious.’

‘Glad it was worthwhile. You’re brave or stupid, one of the two.’

Hector let slip another laugh. ‘It’s still not too late to make this good, Geoffrey. Whatever you think you’re going to achieve in the Winter Palace, you don’t have to go through with it.’

‘So I should just leave you to destroy it?’

‘We have a good life here, cousin, everything we need. Why are you so anxious to ruin things?’

‘If Eunice wanted to screw the family, she had her whole life to do it.’

‘You have a touching faith in human nature. I’d say she’s perfectly capable of screwing us from the afterlife, if that’s what she wanted.’

‘Hector, trust my sister on this. Sunday knew Eunice inside out. Eunice didn’t do pointless, spiteful gestures. And why the hell would she have something against us, anyway?’

‘She lost her mind, cousin. Out there, on the edge of the system. From that point on, she wasn’t thinking straight.’

‘I don’t think she lost her mind. I think she saw something out there, had some kind of experience . . . something that made her look back on everything she’d achieved up to that point and realise it wasn’t necessarily worth all the blood and toil she’d put into it. But that’s not going mad. It’s called getting a sense of perspective.’

After an interval Hector said, ‘Love to think you were right, but we can’t take any chances here. Too much depends on us.’

‘At least let me see what’s inside the Winter Palace.’

‘And if it’s something that hurts us? Something we can’t recover from?’

‘I’m not going to destroy the business,’ Geoffrey said, exhaustedly. ‘I don’t give enough of a damn about it.’

‘And if we’d done something bad? Some crime only she knew about? If you found out that your own flesh and blood had done something unspeakable? Could your conscience allow you to keep the secret then, cousin?’ He imagined Hector shaking his head, tutting beneath his breath. ‘You wouldn’t be able to live with that kind of secret.’

Softly Geoffrey asked, ‘What kind of crime?’

‘How the fuck should I know? Artilects, genetics, weapons: who knows what she got up to a hundred years ago? Who knows what anyone got up to back then?’

‘This doesn’t make any sense, Hector. We’re almost talking like equals now. Why couldn’t we have had this conversation weeks ago?’

Hector sighed, as if it bored him to have to explain something that should have been obvious. ‘Weeks ago you were still family, Geoffrey. Now you’re not. You’ve defected, turned traitor. Now you’re a business adversary. Now you’re an equal. That changes everything. I feel I can almost respect you.’

‘Please turn around.’

‘Kinyeti’s locked on, cousin. I’d maintain a safe distance, I were you.’

‘What are you planning?’

‘What I came here to do,’ Hector said. ‘Demolition.’

Rather than completing its approach, the Kinyeti came to a station-keeping halt fifty kilometres out, following almost the same orbit as the Winter Palace. Geoffrey wondered, optimistically, if Hector had had second thoughts. Perhaps, after all, he had begun to get through to his cousin, making him see sense.

But no. After ten minutes, a much smaller vehicle detached from the head of the mining ship and resumed the original approach vector. They studied the tiny ball-shaped craft at high-mag via the Quaynor’s own cameras. It was the kind of short-range ship-to-ship ferry that could also serve as an escape capsule or single-use re-entry vehicle.

‘Should have seen this coming,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Hector doesn’t want the Kinyeti’s crew getting any closer to the Winter Palace than necessary. Still playing family secrets close to his chest.’

‘Kinyeti is withdrawing,’ Arethusa said as the bigger ship fired a string of steering motors along its spine. ‘Guess they’ll be returning to collect Hector, but for the moment he’s told them to keep the hell away.’

‘They’ll be paid well enough not to ask awkward questions,’ Geoffrey said.

Once he was on his way, it only took Hector twenty minutes to complete the crossing to the Winter Palace. Using the capsule’s micro-thrusters, he executed one inspection pass, spiralling around the station’s cylinder from end to end before closing in for final docking. If the Winter Palace had queried the little ship’s approach authorisation – and then given clearance to commence final docking manoeuvres – there was no practical way to intercept that tight-beamed comms traffic from the Quaynor. Geoffrey could only presume that they would be challenged on their own approach.

‘Synching for dock,’ Gilbert said as Hector’s ship went into a slow roll, matching the station’s centrifugal spin rate. ‘Contact and capture in five . . . four . . . three . . .’

The capsule docked. Clamp arms folded down to secure it. Two or three minutes passed and then there was an exhalation of silvery glitter from the airlock collar. A gasp of escaping pressure, held there since the last time the lock was activated, and then the seals locked tight. The tiny capsule was almost lost in the details of the station’s endcap docking and service structures.

‘Lining us up for the other pole,’ Gilbert said, tapping commands into one of the fold-down keypads. ‘Think we can pass through the entire structure?’

‘It’s just a big hollow tube, with Winter Queen running down the middle,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We shouldn’t have any problems, especially as Arethusa already chinged aboard not so long ago.’

‘I only saw what she let me see,’ Arethusa warned.

Hector’s transfer into the smaller ship had eaten into his lead over the Quaynor, but they were still thirty minutes from docking. Geoffrey drummed his fingertips, the seconds crawling by with agonising slowness. He couldn’t see Hector taking his time inside, no matter the novelty value of being able to roam at will through Eunice’s private kingdom.

They were fifty kilometres out when the first challenge came: shrill and automated, fully in keeping with Eunice’s general policy of not extending a magnanimous welcome to visitors. ‘Unidentified vehicle on approach heading one-one-nine, three-one-seven: you do not have docking or fly-by authorisation. Please adjust your vector to comply with our mandatory exclusion volume.’ The voice, which was speaking Swahili, could easily have passed for his grandmother’s. ‘If you do not adjust your vector, we cannot be held responsible for any damage caused by our anti-collision systems.’

‘Hold the course,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Let her – it – know we mean business. Eunice: are you listening to me?’

‘I’m here,’ the construct said, deigning not to project a figment into what was already a cramped space.

‘Make yourself heard by everyone present, including Arethusa. No reason for them not to listen in on our conversation.’

‘Sunday wouldn’t like that.’

‘Do it anyway. I’m ordering you.’

There was a barely measurable pause. ‘It’s done. They can hear me now.’

‘Good.’ Geoffrey looked around at his companions, trusting that they’d settle for asking questions later. ‘I’m afraid there’s no time to bring you up to speed right now, Eunice, but we need docking permission for the Winter Palace.’

‘Tell it you’re on Akinya business.’

There was little point seeking the construct’s guidance if he was not willing to give her suggestions the benefit of the doubt. ‘Mira – am I patched through?’

‘Say your piece,’ Gilbert said.

‘This is Geoffrey Akinya, grandson of Eunice. I am aboard the deep-space vehicle Quaynor, requesting approach and docking authorisation.’ He waited a moment, then, for all that it sounded pompous, added, ‘I am on important family business.’

‘Approach approval has already been assigned to Hector Akinya. No further docking slots are available.’

Geoffrey ground his teeth. ‘Hector is docked at one pole; we can come in at the other.’

‘No further docking slots are available,’ the voice repeated, but this time with an edge of menace.

‘I have the right to come in,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Disarm your anti-collision systems and give me clearance for the unoccupied dock. You have no choice but to comply with a family instruction.’

‘Your identity is not verified. Desist approach and adjust your vector.’

‘It doesn’t believe you’re you,’ Eunice said.

Geoffrey bit off a sarcastic response before it left his mouth. ‘Why did it accept Hector, and not me?’

‘Hector came in on an Akinya vehicle, showing Akinya registration – the same way Memphis would have done. The Winter Palace had no reason not to let him through.’

He grimaced. ‘Mira – can we fake a civil registration?’

‘Not infallibly, not legally and most certainly not now, given that the habitat already has us pegged as being under different ownership.’ Gilbert shot him an apologetic glance. ‘You’re just going to have to talk your way through this one, Geoffrey. Even Jumai can’t help us until we’re docked.’

‘Need some ideas here, Eunice,’ he said.

‘If the habitat recognises the notion of family visiting rights, if it grasps that Hector is an Akinya and it therefore has an obligation to let him dock – then it may be running something a little bit like me. Much less sophisticated, of course – but a model of Eunice, all the same, and with an attempt at an embedded knowledge base.’

‘All well and good, but I’m not sure that gets us anywhere,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Talk to it. Explain that you are Geoffrey Akinya, and that you’re prepared to submit to questioning to prove it.’

‘Think that’s going to work?’ Jumai asked him.

‘Don’t know. Any other bright ideas, short of fighting our way past anti-collision systems? Those are basically guns, in case you missed the briefing.’

‘Thank you,’ she replied. ‘I do get the fact that there are real risks here.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Geoffrey said. And he meant it, too: of all the people he knew, it was hard to think of anyone less risk-averse than Jumai.

‘Look,’ she said, giving him a conciliatory look, ‘if the construct says this is our best shot—’

‘Are we still on air?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Say your piece,’ Gilbert confirmed.

He cleared his throat. ‘This is Geoffrey Akinya speaking again. I have no formal means of establishing my identity, not at this range. But I’m willing to talk. Eunice knew me. Maybe not well, but as well as she knew anyone in our family. If there’s something, anything, that I can say to prove myself . . . please ask. I will do my best to answer.’

There was silence. Jumai opened her mouth to speak, but she had not even begun to draw breath when the habitat answered again.

‘Disengage all external comms except for this tight-beam link. Any attempt to query the aug will be detected.’

‘It’s done,’ Arethusa said.

After a moment the Winter Palace said, ‘Wooden elephants, a birthday present. How many were there, and how old would Geoffrey Akinya have been when he received them?’

He looked around at his fellow travellers. ‘I would have been five, six,’ he mouthed, keeping his words low enough not to be picked up on the ship-to-station channel. ‘I don’t remember!’

‘I saw those elephants,’ Jumai said, in the same hushed voice. ‘You told me you didn’t even think they’d come from Eunice.’

‘There was a nanny from Djibouti looking after Sunday and at the time . . . I thought maybe she’d got them, or maybe Memphis.’

‘Ask the construct,’ Gilbert said.

‘Can’t. There’s a copy of her assigned to me, like a cloud hovering around me in data-space, but she’s not inside my skull. Without the aug she can’t tell me anything.’

‘I must have an answer,’ the habitat said. ‘How old was Geoffrey Akinya?’

‘Six,’ he said. ‘Six elephants, and . . . I was six at the time. My sixth birthday.’

Silence again, and then, ‘Approach authorisation granted. Proceed for docking at the trailing pole.’

Geoffrey let out a gasp of bottled-up tension. ‘We’re in. Or at least allowed a little closer.’

‘How’d you figure it out, five or six?’ Jumai asked.

‘I didn’t! It was a guess.’

‘Lucky fucking guess.’

‘She knew about the elephants,’ Geoffrey said, as much to himself as anyone present. ‘She may not have bought them . . . but I didn’t even think she cared enough to know—’

‘Enough to make it the billion-yuan question,’ Jumai said.

‘We’re lined up,’ Mira Gilbert said. ‘Still off-aug, and we’ll stay that way for the time being.’ Then her tone changed. ‘Wait. Something’s happening with the Kinyeti. Thruster activity.’

‘Where’s she headed?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Give me a few seconds to nail the vector.’ Gilbert watched and waited, tapping commands into her fold-out keyboard and studying the complex multicoloured readouts as they squirmed through various scenarios. ‘Resumed her approach for the Winter Palace,’ she said, sounding doubtful of her own analysis. ‘That can’t be right, can it? He’s only been in there, what, twenty minutes?’

‘Maybe that’s all he needs,’ Jumai said.

‘He still wouldn’t want to call in the Kinyeti,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Not when he has his own means of getting back. So maybe there’s a problem with the ferry, or he’s told the Kinyeti to block our approach to the other dock.’

‘We have approach authorisation,’ Arethusa said. ‘If he blocks us, this becomes an interjurisdictional incident.’

‘I think it already became one the moment I signed up for citizenship,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I’m slowing our own approach,’ Gilbert said. ‘Want to see what the Kinyeti’s aiming for, before we get in any closer.’

Geoffrey reminded himself that he wasn’t chinging here, his flesh and blood body safely back in Africa. He was physically present, aboard a huge, ponderous, fragile-as-gossamer machine, something that could no more tolerate a collision with another of its kind than it could execute dogfight course changes. And with two delicate ships being drawn to the candleflame of the Winter Palace, the chances of an accident, let alone a deliberate obstructional act, could only increase.

‘Kinyeti is ten kays out,’ Gilbert said, a few minutes later. ‘Looks as if they’re lining up for . . . the docking node where Hector’s already clamped on. That make sense to anyone?’

‘Might be the only entry point they trust,’ Jumai said.

Geoffrey nodded. ‘Let’s wait and see what their intentions are.’

A second or so later, Arethusa said, ‘Pirates.’

She had seen it an instant before the rest of them: an eruption of pinprick light from either end of the habitat’s cylinder, the bright spillage of magnetic and optical collision-avoidance devices as they directed mass and energy against whatever the Winter Palace’s autonomous defence systems had identified as an incoming threat. Not an enemy, because the notion of ‘enemy’ required the supposition of intent, of directed sentience, but rather something dumb and non-negotiable, space debris or a marauding chunk of primeval rock and ice, sailing too close for comfort.

It took Geoffrey a moment to interpret Arethusa’s statement. There were no pirates. But there were proximal impact ranging and target eradication systems, and in English the acronym was precisely the word Arethusa had uttered. Guns, basically, but rigorously fail-safed, incapable of being directed at anything other than a real, imminent collision hazard.

Non-weapons.

They had stood down upon Hector’s approach, but they had not shown the Kinyeti the same courtesy. A moment after he grasped what was happening, Geoffrey saw the flowering of multiple impact points along the Kinyeti’s hull, attended by puffs of sudden silver brightness as metal and ceramics underwent instantaneous vaporisation. The best the pirates could do was subject her to a continuous disruptive assault, aiming to break up her mass into smaller parts that could be individually bulldozed out of harm’s way using further kinetic-energy volleys.

Most of the ship remained. One of her centrifuge arms had been ripped loose, cartwheeling away on its own new orbit, and all up and down her hull lay a peppering of craters and voids where she had been struck. One of her fuel tanks had been punctured and was now venting furiously, while there was evidence of systemic pressure loss from three or four rupture points in the forward module. The view was clouded by the debris and gases expanding away from the ship itself, cloaking her injuries.

But she wasn’t dead. They knew this when a second stutter of heat and light signalled the Kinyeti deploying her own anti-collision systems, this time in a coordinated strike against the habitat. Quite what the legality of that action was, Geoffrey couldn’t begin to guess: the number of instances of ships being attacked by other ships, or stations by ships, or vice versa, was surely so small that there could be little or no precedent for it in modern law. That the Kinyeti was protecting herself was beyond dispute, but equally, her crew must have realised that the habitat would not permit a closer approach, and that their actions were provocative.

From the Quaynor, all they could do was watch, transfixed, as the conflict ran its course. The Kinyeti’s assault had taken out the visible pirate emplacements ringed around either end of the Winter Palace. But the Winter Palace was rotating, and her slow spin brought undamaged emplacements into view. The Palace fired again, blasting another fuel tank, nearly severing the main axis and doing further harm to the command module at the ship’s front. The gas cloud thickened to grey-white smog. The Kinyeti retaliated, less convincingly this time, as if portions of her own defence systems had been damaged or rendered inoperable. Blast sites pockmarked the Winter Palace – some landing far from the endcaps, cratering the unmarked skin of the cylinder, punching so far into insulation that they might have touched the bedrock of Eunice’s private hothouse. The Winter Palace kept spinning, as heavy and oblivious as a grindstone. More pirates revolved into view and rained hell on the Akinya craft. There was a sputter of retaliation, then nothing.

The Winter Palace, largely undamaged even now, maintained its spin as the debris/gas cloud slowly dispersed away from the wreck of the Kinyeti. The tattered, broken-backed mining ship was still moving, still on an approach vector for the habitat.

No further attacks were forthcoming.

‘OK, would someone be so good as to clue me in on what the fuck just happened?’ Jumai asked, doubtless rhetorically.

‘Hector must have called for help, or he was late checking in,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Somewhere between his arrival and the point where it fired on the Kinyeti, the Winter Palace must have changed its mind about him being welcome.’ He sounded awed and appalled even to himself, not quite able to process what he had just witnessed.

‘There could still be survivors,’ Gilbert said. ‘I’m trying to establish direct comms. Resuming aug reach: we don’t have much to lose now, and it may be our only way of establishing a path to the Kinyeti.’ The merwoman paused, rapt with concentration. ‘Oh, wait – here’s something. General distress signal, point of origin Kinyeti. She’s calling for assistance.’

‘Can you patch me through?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘No idea if they can still hear, but you can try. Speak when ready.’

He coughed to clear his throat. ‘This is Geoffrey Akinya, calling the Kinyeti. We saw what just happened to you. What is your status, and how may we assist?’

The reply came through on voice-only comms, sounding as if it had been broken up, scrambled and only partially reassembled. ‘This is Captain Dos Santos . . . Akinya Space mining vehicle Kinyeti. We have sustained damage to critical systems . . . life support . . . inoperable.’ It was a man’s voice, speaking Swahili at source. ‘We can’t steer and we have no delta-vee capability. Our emergency escape vehicle is detached.’

‘They’re screwed,’ Eunice said.

‘We saw the departure,’ Geoffrey said, trying to tune out the construct but not wishing to de-voke her completely. ‘I presume Hector took the vehicle?’

‘I . . .’ Captain Dos Santos hesitated. Geoffrey could imagine him wondering how much he was at licence to disclose. ‘Yes. Of course.’

‘I’m Hector’s cousin, if you didn’t already know.’ Geoffrey glanced at one of Gilbert’s readouts, trusting that he was interpreting it correctly. ‘It doesn’t look as if you’re going to smash into the Winter Palace now – your vector puts you passing close to the docking hub but avoiding an actual collision. That’s lucky.’

‘They must have vented enough gas to push them off course,’ Eunice said. ‘But they’re still at risk from my guns.’

‘They’re your guns, you turn them off,’ Jumai said.

‘I can’t, dear.’

‘We don’t know how many of the Winter Palace’s guns are still operable,’ Geoffrey said, cutting over the construct, ‘and I doubt your information is any better than ours.’

‘No, probably not.’ The captain allowed himself a quiet, resigned laugh. ‘What do you suggest, Mister Akinya?’

‘We can’t risk endangering this ship until you’re out of immediate range of the Winter Palace,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Once we’re satisfied that those guns won’t be turned on us, we’ll close in for docking. You’ll have to ride things out until then. How many of you are there?’

‘Eight,’ Dos Santos answered. Comms had stabilised now: his voice was coming through much more clearly, and without dropouts. ‘That’s the regular crew, myself included.’

‘We can easily take eight survivors,’ Gilbert said. ‘It won’t overburden our life support, and at most we’ll only need to hold them for a few hours before UON or Lunar authorities arrive.’

‘There’s also Hector,’ the captain added.

‘I was about to ask,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Hector was supposed to return on his own – we were never meant to get that close. Then he signalled for help.’

‘He needed technical assistance?’

‘Rescuing. Beyond that, I can’t tell you anything. We think he may have been hurt, but that’s just guesswork – we were on voice-only, no ching, and no biomed feed from his suit.’ Dos Santos grunted: either effort or pain, it was impossible to tell which. ‘But he wouldn’t have called us unless there was a problem.’

‘OK.’ Geoffrey drew a breath, giving himself the space to collect his thoughts. ‘Are you in suits, Captain?’

‘Getting into them as we speak. Afterwards, we’ll crawl into our storm cellar. That’s the best armoured part of the Kinyeti. Should be able to ride out the worst of it in there, even full depressurisation.’

‘Whatever happens, help is on its way. I’m sorry you were dragged into this.’

‘We did what we were asked to do,’ Dos Santos replied. ‘That’s all.’

‘Good luck, Captain.’

‘Same to you, Mister Akinya.’

Dos Santos signed off. Geoffrey remained silent for a few moments, wishing it did not fall on him to say what was surely on all their minds. ‘We can’t leave him there,’ he said quietly. ‘But at the same time, we can’t endanger the Quaynor. We also have a duty of care to the Kinyeti’s survivors.’

‘If they make it through the close approach, they’ll have nothing to fear,’ Arethusa said. ‘Mira said it herself: the authorities will already have been alerted to the attack, and they’ll be on their way very shortly indeed. In a few hours, maybe less, this volume of space will be crawling with enforcement and rescue services.’

‘I’m just as concerned for your safety,’ Geoffrey said.

‘If I’d wanted to be cocooned, I’d never have left Tiamaat,’ the old aquatic answered. ‘We have an advantage over the Kinyeti, anyway – we still have power and steering. Mira, I want you to take us all the way in, to the airlock we originally agreed to use, but in such a way that you minimise our exposure to those pirate emplacements which we suspect may still be operational. Can you do that?’

‘I . . .’ Gilbert’s hands danced on the keypads. ‘I think so. Possibly. Whether the ship’ll take it, I don’t know. We’ll be stress-loading her to the max, to match the habitat’s spin.’

‘They build safety margins into these things,’ Arethusa answered.

‘And I’ve allowed for the margins,’ Gilbert said.

‘Let me look at this,’ Eunice said. ‘I may be able to help.’

‘Are you serious?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Totally. Voke me active ching privilege. I need to drive your body.’

‘No,’ he said, even before he’d begun to consider the implications of her request.

‘You think nothing of chinging into a golem when the mood suits you. Nor would you object if another person wished to drive your body as a warmblood proxy. Why does my request offend you so very deeply?’

He was about to say: Because you’re dead, and you were my grandmother, but he stopped himself in time. The construct was a pattern of self-evolving data, nothing more. It embodied knowledge and certain useful skill-sets. That it just happened to manifest with the body and voice of his late relative was totally immaterial.

So he told himself.

‘I don’t know if Eunice can do a better job than any of us at flying this thing,’ he told the others. ‘What she thinks she can do and what she can really do are not the same things.’

‘I flew ships like this before you were a glint in your mother’s eye,’ Eunice said. ‘The avionics, the interfaces . . . they’re as ancient and old-fashioned as me.’

‘If she can do this—’ Jumai said.

‘We should use all available assets,’ Arethusa concurred. ‘Mira, if you don’t like what’s happening, you can revoke Geoffrey’s command privilege at any time, can’t you?’

Gilbert gave the merwoman equivalent of a shrug. ‘More or less.’

‘I’ll accept the consequences. Geoffrey – I can’t force you to do this, but you have my consent to fly the Quaynor. If Eunice is able to help with that, so much the better.’

‘You must do this,’ Eunice said. Her tone turned needling. ‘You let elephants into your head, grandson. Surely you can make an exception for me.’

‘Give me the controls,’ he said, popping his knuckles, spreading his fingers, loosening his shoulder muscles, just as if he was readying himself for an hour in the Cessna. ‘Eunice – I’m letting you in. You know I can kick you out at any time, so don’t overstay your welcome.’

‘As if I’d ever do that.’

He voked the rarely given command, the one that assigned full voluntary control of his own body to another intelligence. There was nothing magical about it; it was merely an inversion of the usual ching protocols: nerve impulses running one way rather than the other, sensory flow leaving his head rather than entering it.

Still it was strange for him. People did this sort of thing all the time, hiring out their bodies as warmblood proxies. He’d never had cause to ching into a warmblood himself – but if the situation had demanded it, and there’d been no other choice, he supposed he’d have accepted the arrangement without complaint. But the other way round: to be the warmblood? Never in a million years.

And here he was being driven by his grandmother.

She stole his eyes first. Between one moment and the next, they weren’t looking where he wanted, but where she needed to see – and her intake of visual information was so efficient that it felt as if he had gone into a kind of quivering optic seizure, his eyeballs jerking this way and that in the manner of REM sleep. Then she took his hands. They started moving on the fold-out keypads, rap-tapping commands into the Quaynor’s avionics. It felt, for an instant, as if his hands were stuffed into enchanted gloves that forced his fingers to dance.

Then she stole his voice. It still sounded like him: she could make him speak, but she couldn’t alter the basic properties of his larynx.

‘I have an approach solution. It’s imperfect, and it will still expose us to the Winter Palace’s countermeasures. If we were to attempt to match her spin precisely, we’d break up inside sixty seconds. This is a compromise that gets us to the dock and minimises our likelihood of suffering catastrophic damage. I will assume control all the way in, and make any necessary adjustments as we go. Do I have authorisation?’

‘Do you need it?’ Gilbert asked.

‘I thought it best to ask first, child.’

‘Do it,’ Arethusa said.

The acceleration came without warning, without a cushioning transition from zero-gee. To his horror and wonderment, Geoffrey realised that he could hear the engines, even in vacuum. They had been cranked up so high that something of their output, some phantom of undamped vibration, was propagating through the chassis of the ship, despite all the intervening layers of insulation and shockproofing. It sounded like a landslide or a stampede and it made him very, very nervous. Red lights started flashing, master caution alarms sounding. The Quaynor was registering indignant objection to the punishment it was now enduring.

It had served its human masters well. Why were they putting it through this?

‘She’s holding,’ Eunice announced, through Geoffrey’s throat. ‘But that was the easy bit.’

The Quaynor had to execute a curving trajectory to match, or even come close to matching, the Winter Palace’s spin. In the Cessna, it would have needed nothing more than a modest application of stick and rudder. But curvature was acceleration, and in vacuum that could only be achieved by thrust, directed at an angle to the ship’s momentary vector. The magnetoplasma engines could not be gimballed, and therefore the Quaynor was forced to use auxiliary steering and manoeuvring rockets, pushed to their limits. Under such a load, the possibility of buckling was a very real risk. Geoffrey needed no sensors or master-caution alarms to tell him that. He could feel it in the push of his bones against his restraints, the creaks and groans from his surroundings.

When something clanged against the hull he assumed it was the resumption of the Winter Palace’s attack, but no: it was just a speck of debris from the wreckage of the Kinyeti. More came, in drumming volleys, and then they were through the thickest part of it. The acceleration and steering thrust intensified and abated in savage jerks as Eunice finessed her approach solution. They were very close now, fewer than a dozen kilometres from the station, and the extent of its damage – or lack of it – was becoming much clearer. A fraction, maybe one in five, of the pirate devices appeared unharmed. They wheeled slowly into view and then slowly out of view again, like cabins in a Ferris wheel.

‘Maybe we still have approach authorisation,’ Jumai said.

Something hit them. There’d been no warning, and they were so close to the Winter Palace that even a kinetic-energy slug arrived almost instantaneously. The Quaynor shook, and kept shaking, as the energy of the impact whiplashed up and down her chassis. Two or three seconds later, the habitat scored another strike. In the neurotic jitter of his vision, Geoffrey caught Mira Gilbert studying a schematic: an outline of the ship with the damaged areas pulsing an angry red. He wanted to speak, wanted to ask how serious the injuries were, but Eunice still had him in her thrall.

Then it quietened – there were no more impacts – and just as miraculously the acceleration eased, smoothed, reduced to zero. They had transited the volume of maximum hazard.

The Quaynor gave one more creak, and then all was silent. Even the master-caution alarm had stopped blaring.

‘We’re clear,’ Eunice said. ‘My guns can’t touch us now – there’s a zone of avoidance around either docking pole, and we’re well inside it. Normal approach and docking will be completed in . . .’ She made a show of hesitation, although the answer was surely known to her in advance. ‘Thirty seconds. Please fold away your tray-tables and place your seats in the upright position. Thank you for flying with Akinya Space.’

‘Why did you shoot at us?’ Gilbert asked.

‘That wasn’t shooting. That was a reminder not to take anything for granted.’ She made him let out a small, prideful sigh. ‘Well, grandson – now that my work here is done, would you like your body back?’

His eyes stopped their jerky dance. He could speak again, and move his hands normally.

‘You did well,’ he said.

‘You feel the need to compliment me?’

‘It’s what Sunday would do,’ he said, addressing the now disembodied voice. ‘That’s all.’

Soon came a gentle clunk, followed by a quick sequenced drumroll of capture clamps, primed like the petals of some carnivorous plant to lock on to any vehicle that made it this far.

Geoffrey began to undo his restraints. It had been difficult, but they had docked with the Winter Palace.

Now all they had to do was go inside and see what had become of Hector.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

There was darkness, an absence of experience, then dawning amber light, the primal stirrings of consciousness. Then there was a room, warm and golden and as bedecked with finery as the inside of any wealthy merchant’s tent, in any desert caravan from the Arabian Nights.

And Sunday was awake, looking at herself.

A memory stirred: an error she would not make twice. It was not her own face looking down at her, but there were sufficient similarities that a blood relationship could not be denied. A woman’s face, close enough to her own that they might have been sisters or cousins. And she had seen this woman before, behind layers of glass, in a landscape older than Africa.

Her mouth was dry, her lips gummed together. Nonetheless she managed a word.

‘Soya.’

‘Glad you remember me. You were both pretty cold by the time we reached you. Your suits only had a few hours of effective life support left in them.’ Soya was dressed in a white blouse, draped with about a dozen necklaces, some hung with jewelled pendants, some with wooden charms. She was all skin and bones, lean and angular where Sunday (as she would readily admit) was padded and ample. They had genes in common, but they’d been raised on very different worlds. Soya’s legs, in leather trousers with calf-length boots, were stupidly long and slender. She was taller than Sunday, and towered over her even more so now that Sunday was lying on her back, on a couch or bed in one corner of the room. It had curtains rather than walls. Incense smoked in candleholders. The air smelled of honey, cinnamon, baking bread.

‘Jitendra?’ she asked, forming his name in three distinct syllables, each of which cost her effort.

‘He’s well, don’t worry.’ Soya was pouring something into a glass. Bangles clashed against each other on her wrist, making a constant metallic hiss whenever she moved. ‘You don’t remember much about being rescued?’

‘No,’ Sunday said.

‘But you know my name.’

‘We’ve met before.’

‘Yes, we did.’ There was a note of reproach in that. ‘And still you got into trouble with those people. Well, you can’t say you weren’t warned.’ Soya leaned down and offered the glass to Sunday’s lips. ‘Drink this.’

The liquid was sugary and welcome. It rinsed some of the dryness from her mouth and throat; notched her one step closer to the living.

‘I don’t know who you are, Soya.’ Sunday dredged a hard-won memory from the recent past. ‘You told me you were born here, on Mars. You said something about Nigeria. We’re still on Mars, aren’t we?’

‘You’ve only been out about thirteen hours. It’s tomorrow.’ Soya smiled at that, and the smile cut through Sunday. She’d seen it a million times, in her own reflection. Just not as much lately as she might have wished.

‘And that’s all I get? We’re related, Soya. I’ve known that from the moment I first saw your face. And why would you make contact with me if it wasn’t connected with my family?’

Soya smiled, but with less assurance than before. ‘I know you want answers, but you’ve had a difficult couple of days and you should probably rest first.’

‘You just told me I’ve been asleep since yesterday.’

‘After nearly dying.’

Sunday took a leap into the void. The question was absurd on a number of levels, but she had to ask it. ‘Are you . . . related to Eunice? Are you some granddaughter or grand-niece I never knew about?’

‘No, I’m not related to her. I’d offer you a cell scraping, if you had a means of testing it.’ Soya looked down, fiddling absently with the necklaces. ‘But you and me, that’s a different story. We do have a common ancestor. But it’s not Eunice.’

Sunday pushed herself up from the couch. Heavy blankets slid away from her. She was wearing lime-green football shorts and a cheap yellow tourist T-shirt with an animated space elevator printed on the front. The logo said Pontaniak.

‘Who, Soya?’ The other woman had half a head on her, but she still took a step away, as if she hadn’t anticipated a show of determination quite this valiant.

‘Jonathan,’ Soya said. And as if that was not enough – there was only one Jonathan in Sunday’s firmament – Soya added, ‘Beza. Eunice’s husband. The man she came to Mars with.’

Sunday shook her head reflexively. ‘Jonathan Beza died more than sixty years ago. Eunice and he had divorced by then. There was an accident, here on Mars. Some kind of pressure blow-out.’

‘And that precludes me from being related to him?’

‘He remarried before his death. He had more children, and some of them had children themselves. Nathan even came to the funeral, and I know about all the others. There’s no Soya anywhere in that family tree.’

‘In which case you’re looking at the wrong tree.’

It had not been Soya who said that. This voice was deep and sonorous, varnished and craquelured. It spoke Swahili, but with an old-fashioned diction that called to mind nothing in Sunday’s experience but Memphis Chibesa.

She turned to follow the voice to its origin. There, standing in a gash of the curtain – like an actor hesitating to join the stage – was the oldest man she had ever seen.

‘I am Jonathan Beza,’ the man said. ‘I am your grandfather, Sunday Akinya. I was married to Eunice. And yes, I am very much alive.’

Jitendra was looking to her for guidance. She signalled with the slightest nod that yes, she believed this man to be exactly who he said he was. As absurd as that was to take in, after everything she had accepted in her life.

‘It was easier to die then,’ Jonathan Beza said. ‘You must remember that this was a different Mars, a different time. Even now, as you’ve experienced, there are places on this world where a person can disappear very effectively. Or be made to disappear.’ He stopped to pour chai for his daughter and their two guests.

‘You mean there was never an accident?’ Sunday asked.

‘There was. The same sort of accident that still happens very occasionally nowadays. It was real, and I didn’t engineer it in any way. I should hope not: good people died in it, after all.’

‘But you saw your chance to vanish,’ Jitendra said.

‘The thought had been at the back of my mind for some time. The Mech was so primitive back then we didn’t even call it the Mech. The few implants I carried were easily disabled, or fooled into giving false reports. When the opportunity to fall off the edge of the world presented itself, I took it.’ He fixed his gaze on Sunday. ‘Your grandmother didn’t know. She wasn’t complicit in this. She even came to my funeral.’

‘That was when she returned to Phobos,’ Sunday said.

‘Yes.’

They were sitting in a different curtained room. Sunday still had no idea where they were, beyond Jonathan’s assurance that it was still Mars. There was no aug reach, no Eunice. In their place was a noise like distant engines and the occasional bump or sway that led her to think she was in a vehicle.

A possibility had presented itself, but she’d dismissed it instantly.

‘You found us in the Evolvarium,’ Jitendra said. ‘Have you any idea what we were doing there?’

Jonathan said, ‘Dying?’

‘Other than that,’ Sunday said.

‘Yes, I have a shrewd idea what you were doing. Better than a shrewd idea, actually.’ He paused, apparently to collect himself, marshalling energies before proceeding. Jonathan was small, wiry, obviously immensely old but nowhere near as frail as Sunday might have expected for one of his age. He was even older than Eunice: she’d have queried the construct for his date of birth, if the construct had been reachable. Born 2020 or thereabouts, if not earlier. A man now in his hundred-and-forties. That made him old, but not impossibly so. He wore the inner layer of a spacesuit, a tight black garment sewn with coolant lines and studded with the gold-plated discs of biomonitor sockets. His arms were scrawny but there was still muscle tone there, and no trace of arthritis or neurodegenerative tremor in his fingers. Sunday had watched as he poured the chai; he hadn’t spilt a drop. His head was mostly hairless, save for a corona of fine white fuzz around his scalp, his face abundantly wrinkled, the already dark skin mottled by pure black lesions, yet remaining startlingly expressive. His eyes were clear and focused, his smile alarmingly youthful.

‘Then you’ll know it was a waste of time,’ Jitendra said.

‘I know Dorcas cheated you. That may not amount to quite the same thing.’

‘How much do you know?’ Sunday asked, directing her question at Soya. ‘You were in Crommelin. You must be registered as a citizen or tourist to be anywhere on Mars, so you can’t have dropped off the map the way your father has.’

Jonathan answered for her. ‘Soya has been my lifeline, Sunday. She has been able to move in the Surveilled World, be my eyes and ears. She has arranged medicine for me, on the few occasions when I have needed it.’

‘I have a false history,’ Soya said, looking at Sunday and Jitendra in turn. ‘My connection to my father . . . and by extension your grandmother . . . isn’t part of that history.’

‘You could never do such a thing on Earth, or any place where the Surveilled World is fully developed. On Mars, now, it would be difficult. It was easier when Soya was born.’

‘How old are you?’ Sunday asked.

‘Fifty,’ Soya said. ‘Does that surprise you?’

‘I don’t suppose it should.’

‘Eunice wasn’t her mother,’ Jonathan said, confirming what Soya had already told Sunday. ‘There was a woman, an investigator. Her name was Lizbet. She had her doubts about my death, and she followed them to me.’

‘I never heard about any investigation,’ Sunday said.

‘Lizbet decided not to go public with her story once she’d heard my side of things. She became my companion, and we had a daughter. We were happy. Lizbet died twenty years ago.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Sunday and Jitendra said in unison. Then, on her own, Sunday continued, ‘And what was your side of the story, Jonathan? Why this secrecy? What persuaded Lizbet to keep it to herself?’

‘I know why your grandmother came back to Mars. My funeral was a useful pretext, but she’d have found a way to do it whatever happened. She spent time on Phobos, more than she needed to. I don’t know what she got up to there, but I presume whatever it was led you here?’

Sunday eyed Jitendra before proceeding. ‘We’ve been following something ever since she died. It began with an anomaly in her private banking files. That led us from Africa to the Moon. On the Moon my brother found something in a safe-deposit box. That led us to Pythagoras. What we found in Pythagoras led me to Phobos. Phobos led me to the Evolvarium.’

‘And now to me,’ Jonathan said.

‘Except I didn’t find you,’ Sunday said. ‘You found me. Soya knew I was on the planet: that’s why she contacted me in Crommelin.’

‘It was easy to track your arrival,’ Soya said. ‘Given the timing, there couldn’t be any other reason why you’d come to Mars, other than to find out what your grandmother had buried here.’

‘I failed,’ Sunday said.

Jonathan braced his hands on his knees and rose from his chair. ‘Do you have any idea where you are?’

‘Somewhere out in the sticks, I’m guessing. A camp or station everyone assumes to be unoccupied. Probably quite near the Evolvarium, since I doubt we travelled very far overnight.’ She was careful not to voice her suspicion that they were moving.

‘Not near,’ Jonathan corrected, with a smile. ‘In. We’ve never left it.’

It came back to her in disconnected glimpses, as of a dream forgotten until some chance association called it to mind, much later in the day. Jitendra had seen it first: that hill, a feature in the terrain that ought not to have been there, glimpsed from within their makeshift shelter as they waited for night and whatever it might bring. A hill that was approaching.

The Aggregate.

Not a hill, but a machine as large as a skyscraper, crunching slowly across the Evolvarium. Sunday remembered what she had learned regarding the Aggregate, aboard the Overfloater airship. It was not one machine, but a society of them. From the level of sifters to apex predators, they had organised in the interests of mutual reliance and interdependence. It was a stinging affront to the basic function of the Evolvarium. Whereas the other machines toiled and clashed and evolved, sparking off industrial novelties as a by-product of their struggle for survival, the Aggregate gave nothing back. Whatever it innovated, it kept to itself.

It had sent out an envoy to meet them. With that memory came the aftertaste of the fear they had both felt as they crouched in their makeshift shelter. The Aggregate’s envoy was a quick-scuttling thing like an iron ant, black-armoured and as large as the rover whose wreckage they had repurposed. Even if their suits had been working at full capacity, they could never have outrun it. It had ripped away the petals of their shelter, flinging them to the winds, and loomed over them in all its eyeless belligerence. Its head was a blank metal sphere, its torso a pinch-waisted cylinder. In addition to its pistoning black legs it had whipping cilia. It had plucked them from the ground, not without a certain carelessness, and a red-lit aperture had opened in its belly.

After that, Sunday didn’t remember very much.

Yet here they were, in the Aggregate. There was no need to take Jonathan Beza’s word for that. From a high vantage point, the queen of her own castle, Sunday was looking down on the very machine she had assumed meant to have her crushed and recycled for useful materials.

It was motley. Hundreds of basic organisms had fused or locked together to form the structural outline of the Aggregate, and that didn’t begin to touch the implied complexity of its interior. Not a skyscraper, then, for that conveyed entirely too much symmetry and orderliness. The Aggregate was more like a city block, a dense-packed huddle of buildings constructed at different times and according to varying objectives and governing aesthetics. It was approximately pyramidal in shape, wide and flat at the base, rising in steps and pinnacles and buttresses to a sort of summit, but there was nothing geometric or harmonious about it. Sunday saw where some of the machines had fused into the main mass, like gargoyles on a cathedral. Others must have changed beyond all recognition, so that it was not easy to tell where one began and another ended, or what their original forms and locomotive principles must have been like. From here, looking down, she couldn’t see how the Aggregate moved its colossal bulk. She presumed countless legs and feet were deployed under the flat base of the city, working in concert so that the ride was mostly smooth. Dust welled up constantly from the Aggregate’s margins, stirred by whatever mechanisms toiled underneath it.

‘No one ever mentioned anything about this thing being inhabited,’ Sunday said. They were in a many-windowed cupola, a hundred or more metres above the ground.

‘They don’t know,’ Jonathan said. ‘No one does, except Soya and me. Maybe some of the Overfloaters suspect, but that’s not the same thing as knowing and it’s certainly not something they’ll talk about in polite company. They can’t tell for sure, from the outside. The glass is one-way, and with all the waste heat and chemistry a machine like the Aggregate radiates, there’s no way of picking out the signatures of a couple of human occupants. Especially when the Aggregate doesn’t want anyone to know about us.’

‘So you’re its prisoners?’ she asked. But that didn’t work: Soya clearly had free roam of Mars, and must have come back here of her own volition.

‘No,’ Jonathan said. ‘I’m its client. The Aggregate benefits from a human consultant. That’s really all I am to it: just another modular component it can depend on when the need arrives. It makes me comfortable – more than comfortable, actually – and it tolerates my absence when I’m not here.’

‘It lets you come and go as you please?’

‘We agreed terms. It would rather put up with that than have me kill myself. Needless to say, I can’t go very far – that’s one of the drawbacks of being dead. But I’m not a prisoner.’

‘I’m finding all this a little difficult to take in. I’ve spent my whole life thinking you were dead.’

‘I’m afraid there was no other way. The best that Soya could do was warn you to be on your guard against the Pans. It was obvious to us that they couldn’t be trusted simply to let you walk away with the prize.’

‘You knew they were planning to steal it?’ Jitendra asked.

‘No, but there was a strong possibility of that happening. Had this all taken place in the Surveilled World, there wouldn’t have been much scope for treachery. But the Evolvarium gave them the perfect opportunity to commit an unwitnessed crime.’

‘I witnessed it,’ Sunday said.

Jonathan allowed a thin smile to play across his lips. ‘You don’t count.’

‘We’ll see about that, when I get back to Earth. They’re going to find out that I’m still an Akinya, and bad things happen when you cross us.’

‘Yes . . .’ Jonathan stretched the word, managing to sound less than entirely convinced by Sunday’s statement. ‘Funny how you’re so keen to slip back into the fold the moment you’re wronged. You’ve been running away from your family all these years, but the moment life throws something at you that you don’t like . . . you’re straight back into the arms of the household, a good little Akinya with the family behind her.’

Sunday bristled, but said nothing.

‘I don’t blame you for that,’ Jonathan continued, conveying entirely the opposite impression, ‘but it would be unwise in the extreme to underestimate the Pans. They’re not just a movement with a few ships and people. Behind the Initiative is the entire geopolitical armoury of the United Aquatic Nations. Take them on, you’re taking on half the planet.’

‘You’ve kept up with Earthside politics, then,’ Sunday said, her tone sour.

‘I may be dead, but I’m not a hermit.’

‘Well, it’s all for nothing anyway,’ Jitendra said. ‘We don’t have a clue what was in that box, and we can’t even prove they stole it. Without corroboration, the evidence of our eyes won’t be admissible in any court. Whatever’s in the box may mean nothing to them without Sunday’s background knowledge of Eunice. That’s assuming they ever gave a shit. Maybe all they wanted was for us not to get our hands on it. Well, they succeeded. We’re all losers now.’

‘The Overfloaters must have been surprised,’ Jonathan said.

‘Surprised by what?’ Sunday asked, irritated and fatigued.

‘That the object was still underground after so many years. Did they not express scepticism that it would still be there?’

‘Dorcas said it was strange that the machines hadn’t found it,’ Jitendra said. ‘But there it was.’

‘Or rather, there it wasn’t,’ Jonathan said. ‘Come, let’s go back downstairs. I have something you might be interested in.’

CHAPTER THIRTY

‘And there was I,’ Jumai said, ‘thinking maybe I’d get paid for nothing. Silly me. As if anything’s ever that easy.’

‘I didn’t mean to raise any unrealistic expectations,’ Geoffrey said.

They were moving side by side down the docking tube, brushing themselves along with fingertip pressure against the rough-textured walling.

‘Look at it this way, though,’ he went on. ‘You’re hoping this is going to do wonders for your reputation. Wouldn’t work if it turned out to be too easy, would it?’

‘Fuck my reputation. Right now I’ll settle for easy.’

They had matched the habitat’s spin in the moments before docking, but as they traversed the connecting tube Geoffrey still felt weightless, albeit with the sensation that the world was tumbling slowly around him. The docking tube was aligned with the Winter Palace’s axis of rotation, and he would therefore need to travel a lot further out before he felt anything resembling a normal gravitational pull. But even in the absence of visual cues that spin was impossible to ignore.

They were wearing spacesuits, of course: lightweight, hypermodern, form-fitting models from the Quaynor’s own equipment stores. Like the submarine harness in Tiamaat, Geoffrey’s suit had put itself on around him, splitting open, encasing him from head to toe and reassembling along a dozen improbable seams that were now completely invisible and airtight. Technology had come a long way since Eunice’s ancient gauntlet-like moonglove was state of the art.

Mira Gilbert’s mobility harness was not optimised for weightlessness, and since the station was presently denying aug reach, there was no way for Arethusa to ching a proxy. Given that someone had to physically enter the Palace to locate Hector, Geoffrey was glad it was just the two of them. Arethusa would want to know what they found, and she would ching aboard as soon as that became feasible, but for now the Pans would have to be patient. Even Eunice couldn’t stick her oar in.

They had passed without incident through the connected airlocks of the Quaynor and the Winter Palace, but now they came to the first obstruction: an internal door, armoured against pressure loss, blocked their progress. It was circular, cartwheeled with heavy bee-striped reinforcing struts. The manual control had no effect, and the door was certainly too large to force.

‘I keep having to remind myself, Hector didn’t come this way,’ Geoffrey said. ‘For all we know, this door hasn’t been opened in years.’

‘Give me a minute,’ Jumai answered. ‘I’ve cracked data vaults that haven’t been opened in a century. This is just warm-up stuff.’

Jumai had spent her time on the Quaynor profitably, packing a holdall full of anything she deemed useful. Now she rummaged through the bag’s weightless guts, pushing aside intestinal spools of data cables and stick-on sensor pads. She came out with a chunky rectangle of black plastic, geckoed it to the side of the door, over the operating panel, and connected a grey cable into her suit’s forearm.

She tapped a panel on the forearm, which sprang open to form a surprisingly large keypad and screen. The suits might be modern, but they’d been customised according to Pan specifications, which meant physical readouts and data-entry options.

‘What’s the story?’ Geoffrey ventured, when she’d been tapping keys and pursing her lips at scrolling numbers for several minutes.

‘The story is . . . we’re in.’

She tapped one last key, ripped the stick-on pad away from the panel. The door wheeled aside, recessing into a slot in the sidewall. The door’s bare metal edges were toothed like a cogwheel.

‘It was that easy?’

‘Easier than it looked. Wanted to make absolutely sure there was nothing nasty beyond the door, like fire or vacuum or sarin nerve gas.’

‘We’re in suits.’

‘I like additional guarantees.’ Jumai packed her equipment away and sealed the holdall. ‘No second chances in this line of work. Learned that in Lagos.’

They called back to the Quaynor, told them that they were passing through the door. There was still no aug reach, but for the moment simple comms were getting through.

‘We’ve reached a right-angled bend,’ Jumai reported. ‘It’s the only way forward. Looks like it runs all the way back out to the skin.’

‘That makes sense,’ Geoffrey said. ‘The Winter Queen fills the middle of the habitat, and her engines and aerobrake would block our progress if we tried to pass along the axis of rotation. We have to go up to move forward. Hector would have hit the same dead end coming in from his side.’

‘Assuming he got this far,’ Jumai said.

‘He was inside this thing for a while before calling for help.’

They started moving along the radial shaft. It was wide and set with multiple hand- and footholds, and to begin with there was no sense that they were climbing either up or down. But every metre took them further from the axis, thereby increasing the tug of centrifugal gravity, tending to push them still further from the axis. For a while, it was easy and pleasant to drift, but there came a point when it took more effort than anticipated to arrest his motion. In that moment Geoffrey’s inner ear decided, forcefully, that his local universe now contained a very definite up and down, and that he was suspended the wrong way up in what appeared to be an infinitely deep, plunging lift shaft.

Vertigo gripped him. He caught his breath and closed his eyes.

‘Easy,’ Jumai said.

He forced his eyes open. ‘Has to be a better way.’

‘Probably is, if we’d come in through the other lock. Can’t see many people putting up with this shit. Then again, did your grandmother get many visitors?’

‘No,’ he answered, as with great care he inverted himself so that the force of gravity was acting in the direction of his feet, not his head. ‘Just Memphis, and even then not very often.’

‘Take it one rung at a time, and don’t look down any more than you have to.’

‘We’ll never get Hector back up this shaft if he’s hurt.’

‘Comes to that, we’ll call for help from the Quaynor. They can lower us a rope, or use the ship’s thrusters to take some of the spin off the habitat.’

‘Anyone would think you’d done this a million times.’

‘It’s all just breaking and entering.’ He could imagine Jumai grinning. ‘Used to delude myself that there was something in my brain, some developmental flaw which might mean I was predisposed to criminality. Wouldn’t that be glamorous? But I was wrong. The scans came back and I’m . . . almost tediously normal. Not a single brain module out of place or underdeveloped. I just happen to be more than averagely competent at breaking into things.’

Geoffrey forced a smile of his own. He might not have dragged Jumai out of Lagos – she’d quit of her own accord – but he couldn’t deny that there had been a large measure of self-interest. However it had worked out, it was good to have her back in his life.

By turns, and his vertigo notwithstanding, he found a steady descending rhythm, always ensuring that he had three points of contact with the wall. The suit might well protect him in the event of a fall, but he had no desire to put that to the test.

When at last they reached the ‘floor’, they’d come – by the suit’s estimation – a total of seventy-five vertical metres. Ambient gravity was now one gee, or as close as made no difference, and since the Winter Palace was only a little wider than one hundred and fifty metres across, they must be very close to the interior surface of its insulating skin. In the restricted space at the base of the shaft, Geoffrey could do little more than walk a few paces in either direction before he reached an obstructing wall or door. The gravity felt convincing enough in terms of the effort required and the load on his joints, but his inner ear insisted that something wasn’t quite right.

Jumai was already tackling the door that was their only point of ingress into the rest of the habitat. It looked similar to the one they’d already come through, but when more than a few minutes had elapsed without her managing to open it, Geoffrey guessed that this door presented additional challenges.

‘You think there’s something bad on the other side?’ he asked, hardly daring to break her concentration but not able to stop himself.

‘There’s pressure,’ she said quietly. ‘And unless these telltales are lying, it’s not nerve gas or a wall of fire. That’s not the problem, I’m afraid.’

‘So what is?’

‘Door’s interlocked with the one back up the shaft. Give me a day, and more equipment than we came with, and I might be able to bypass that interlocking mechanism. But right now, and with this equipment, I won’t be able to get us through this one without closing the other.’

‘And thereby cutting off contact with the Quaynor.’

‘Give the man a cigar.’

Geoffrey thought about this before answering. He didn’t like it, and he doubted Jumai liked it either, but they had come a long way to turn back now. ‘Have you ever been in a situation similar to this, in Lagos, or anywhere else you did contract work?’

‘Crazy question if you were asking anyone else, but . . . yes. Once or twice. Some of those server farms were designed by seriously paranoid arseholes.’

‘And you still went through.’

‘Had a job to do.’

‘So your judgement was correct, in the moment. You made a decision . . . and it paid off.’

‘Wouldn’t be having this conversation otherwise. I mean, I’m not saying I’d be dead, exactly, but sure as hell I wouldn’t still be in this line of work.’

‘In which case . . . I think you should open that door.’

Jumai’s hand was poised over the flip-out keypad on her sleeve forearm. ‘Let’s be clear about one thing, rich boy. No guarantees about what we’ll find on the other side, or how the door mechanism will look to me then. Might not be as easy to retrace as it was to come this far.’

‘Whatever it takes.’

After they had spoken to the Quaynor, Jumai said, ‘You grown balls of steel all of a sudden?’

‘Guess it’s just dawning on me – I’ve burnt too many bridges to start having second thoughts now.’ He knuckled his fist against the chest plate of the suit. ‘Fuck it all. I’m Geoffrey Akinya. This is my grandmother’s house. And I have every damned right to see what’s inside it.’

‘Hell, yeah,’ Jumai said.

And tapped the keypad.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Jonathan Beza whipped the blanket free with a magicianly flourish, beaming at Sunday as if this was a moment he had been planning for years.

The blanket had concealed a box. It was, superficially, much like the box that Gribelin’s proxy had unearthed the day before: the same dimensions, the same grey alloy casing. It looked older, though. Sunday couldn’t put her finger on exactly why that should be so, but she knew she was looking at something that had been locked and buried a long time ago. The dents and scratches had provenance.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘Eunice came back for my funeral,’ Jonathan said. ‘This we know. But she didn’t just come back for that. I . . . followed her.’ He hesitated, looking aside as if there was shame in what he had done. ‘At a distance, obviously, and I don’t think she ever suspected anything. It wasn’t difficult to track her movements, and there was no Evolvarium then. I traced her return to her old landing site, near Pavonis Mons – the burial spot.’

‘You saw her bury the box?’ Sunday asked.

He shook his head firmly. ‘No – I couldn’t get that close, not without making my presence known. But when she’d gone, there was nothing to stop me returning to the landing site. I gave it a year or two, just to let the dust settle. Part of me worried that the whole thing was a trap to flush me out.’

‘But it wasn’t.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘As much as it pains me, I think I was the last thing on her mind by then. Even my funeral . . . it suited her to come back to attend it, but maybe she already had other plans . . .’ He trailed off. ‘Perhaps you’d better open the box.’

‘Do you know what’s in it?’ Jitendra asked.

‘Yes, and it’s perfectly safe. But it won’t talk to me.’

As Sunday worked the catches at the side of the box, she said, ‘I still don’t get it. The box Dorcas stole – where did that one come from?’

‘Oh, that,’ Jonathan said, as if this was a detail he had nearly allowed to slip his mind. ‘I put that there, obviously. I knew that the real box was meant for someone to find, someone connected to the family. For sixty years, no one came. Then Eunice’s death was announced, and less than four months later her granddaughter shows up on Mars.’ He touched his fingers to his chin, as if mulling a difficult problem. ‘Hm. I wonder if those two things might possibly be connected?’

‘I was keeping an eye on things for him,’ Soya said. ‘When it became clear that you intended to enter the Evolvarium, there was no doubt that you’d come for the box.’

‘While Soya was meeting you in Crommelin,’ Jonathan said, ‘I was out there burying the decoy box. No one saw me do it. With the machines sniffing around, it wouldn’t stand a chance of going undetected for more than a few weeks. But we didn’t need that long, just the few days it would take you to cross Mars and reach the burial site.’

‘It was good that I warned you that the Pans couldn’t necessarily be trusted,’ Soya said. ‘It meant that you understood the situation the moment Dorcas turned on you. From what we can gather, you played your parts very well indeed. Dorcas never had the slightest idea that she’d been duped.’

‘She got the wrong box,’ Jitendra said, marvellingly.

‘And left you to the mercy of the Evolvarium,’ Soya added. ‘She cut a lot of deals to make that snatch. Frankly, no one will be shedding any tears if the other Overfloaters rip the Lady Disdain to shreds.’

Sunday had finally succeeded in opening the catches. She eased back the lid, the hinges stiff but manageable. She wasn’t sure what to expect this time. There had been a smaller box inside the decoy, but perhaps the point of that had just been to delay the Overfloaters. Inside this box she found a dense matrix of foam packing, and a rounded object poking through the top of the packing.

‘Take it out,’ Jonathan said. ‘It won’t bite.’

She understood the significance of his comment as she withdrew the ancient space helmet from the box. Even in Martian gravity it was heavy in her hands: like something forged from iron or cut from solid marble. She had never handled a helmet quite so antiquated.

But she had seen it before.

Vivid paintwork covered the helmet: slashes of yellow, gold and black, daubs of white and red around the visor’s rim. The paintwork had chipped to reveal bare metal in places, was scuffed and dirty elsewhere, but the design was still clear. It was a fierce blue-eyed lioness, her mouth gaping wide around the faceplate.

‘Senge Dongma,’ Sunday said, in reverence and awe. ‘The lion-faced one. This is Eunice’s actual helmet.’

‘Knew you’d recognise it,’ Jonathan said.

Sunday bit back the admission that she would have recognised nothing were it not for the construct. ‘I . . . saw an image of it on Phobos,’ she said. ‘Very recently. Was this really hers?’

‘This is what she buried. It’s been in my care ever since.’

She turned the helmet around in her hands, wheeling it like a globe, cradling history between her fingertips. In forced exile from her own family, Sunday had handled remarkably few artefacts with a direct link to her grandmother. This helmet, had it been back in the household museum, would have been one of the most hallowed relics.

‘This is all there was?’ she asked. ‘Nothing else with it?’

‘Were you expecting more?’ Jonathan responded.

‘It is just a helmet. The other things we’ve found pointed to something – another burial. This doesn’t.’

‘You’re sure of that?’ he asked.

‘It doesn’t take me any further than Mars. I know she had this helmet when she was on Phobos, so she would have brought it down to Mars when the dust storm cleared. But we’re on Mars already. It’s a dead end.’

‘Unless you’re missing something,’ Jonathan said.

‘It’s not just a helmet,’ Jitendra said, ‘is it? I mean, it is a helmet, but that doesn’t mean it’s just a lump of metal and plastic. There’s computing power inside it. It will have seen and recorded things, while she was using it.’

She looked at Jonathan. ‘Have you investigated that?’

‘The helmet is old,’ Jonathan said, ‘but from a mechanical standpoint there’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t have an internal power supply of its own, though. It will only work when it’s connected to a suit, via a compatible neck ring.’

‘Tell her,’ Soya said.

Jonathan shot his daughter a tolerant smile. ‘The suit could be anywhere, if it still exists. Eunice only left the helmet here, at this particular burial site. But it doesn’t have to be the same suit to make the helmet work. It just has to fit.’

‘You’d still have to find an old suit,’ Jitendra said.

‘That’s what antiques markets are for,’ Soya said, with a glimmer of pride. ‘It took me a long, long time, but I found one in the end, not far from Lowell. Not as old as the helmet, only about seventy years, but with the same coupling.’ She whisked aside one of the room’s curtains, revealing an old-fashioned composite shell spacesuit, olive drab and grey, with evidence of damage and repair all over it. The suit was complete from the neck ring down, hanging from a rack that had been bolted to the metal innards of the Aggregate. ‘It’s a piece of shit,’ Soya explained. ‘You’d trust your life to this thing only if it was the absolute last resort. But it can still juice the helmet.’

Sunday asked the obvious question. ‘Have either of you tried it on?’

‘Both of us,’ Jonathan answered. ‘Some kind of low-level sphinxware running inside it. Beyond a few gatekeeper questions, it won’t talk to either of us. But it might work for you.’

There was no part of getting into that musty old suit that Sunday could be said to have enjoyed. The suit was a poor fit in all the critical places (it felt as if it had been tailored for a portly child, not a woman) and being seventy years old, it did nothing to assist in the process of being worn. Without the complicity of Jitendra, Jonathan and Soya, she doubted she would have been able to put the hideous old thing on at all. Conversely, without them there, she probably wouldn’t have had the nerve to keep trying. Each component of the suit, as it clicked into place, added to her sense of imprisonment and paralysis.

The suit was not functioning, in any accepted sense of the word. Its motive power-assist was dead, so it required all of Sunday’s strength and determination to move it even slightly. The best she could manage was a ghoulish, mummylike shuffle, and the effort of that would soon tax her to exhaustion. Not that she could go very far anyway. Its cooling and air-recirculation systems were only barely operative, so it was as hot and stuffy as the inside of a sleeping bag. It had no independent internal power supply, but needed to be connected to the Aggregate by an energy umbilical. Only then could the suit feed power to the helmet, which had to be locked into place before it would boot-up and function. Sunday felt ready to be buried. The air circulator huffed and wheezed like an asthmatic dog. Caution indicators, blocked in red, were already illuminating the faceplate head-up display. Even before it had fully booted, the helmet knew that it was plugged into a piece of barely safe garbage, and it wasn’t too happy about it.

‘The current user is not recognised,’ the helmet said, its waspish buzzing into her ears in Swahili. ‘Please identify yourself.’

With an assertiveness that rather surprised herself, she declared, ‘I am Sunday Akinya.’

The helmet went quiet for a few seconds, as if it was thinking things over. ‘Please state your relationship to Eunice Akinya.’

‘I’m her granddaughter. I’ve come to Mars for this helmet. Please recognise my authority to wear it.’

‘What brought you to Mars?’

She had to think about that, sensing that the suit might be looking for a very specific answer. ‘Something I found in Phobos,’ she said, cautiously.

‘What did you find in Phobos?’

‘A painting.’ She took a breath, feeling sweat prickle her forehead. ‘A mural. There was a mistake . . . an alteration. The peacock should have been a different bird. A crane, maybe an ibis.’

‘What brought you to Phobos?’

Had she passed the first test, or merely skipped to the next question having failed the first one? The suit gave no clue. ‘Pages from a book,’ Sunday said, swallowing hard. ‘Gulliver’s Travels. It was a clear reference to the moons of Mars, and Eunice had only ever spent time on Phobos, so that had to be the right moon.’ Through the helmet glass, which was beginning to mist up, Jitendra and the others were watching her with avid interest. They were ready to spring to her aid should something go wrong with the life-support system, but knowing that didn’t alleviate Sunday’s sense of confinement. ‘I found the pages on the Moon – Earth’s Moon,’ she added. ‘In the crater Pythagoras.’

‘What led you to Pythagoras?’

‘A glove, which we found in a safe-deposit box, also on the Moon. The glove used to belong to Eunice Akinya. There were . . . gems in the glove. Plastic gems, three different colours. The numbers corresponded to a Pythagorean triple. Knowing Eunice’s history, we were able to pinpoint a crash site in the crater.’ She felt as if she was going to faint. ‘That’s all I’ve got. The existence of the safe-deposit box came from an audit of Eunice’s affairs, after her death.’

‘What was the significance of the coloured gems?’

‘The colours had . . . no significance.’ But why would the helmet have asked her that if the answer was so simple? ‘Except they had to be different colours so that we could count them.’

That was what Jitendra had said, at least – and she’d been more than ready to accept that explanation. But the gems had been stuffed into different fingers. Given the care they’d taken with the examination, they’d have been unlikely to muddle them up.

‘You have failed to pass all security questions,’ the helmet said. ‘Nonetheless, you are recognised as having the necessary authority. Please wait.’

‘Please wait for what?’

‘Please wait.’

Even through the fogging glass, Jitendra must have seen the doubt in her eyes. He pushed his face close to the visor. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked, voice muffled as if many rooms away.

‘It asked me a bunch of questions!’ she shouted back, making herself feel lighter-headed in the process. ‘I failed at least one of them, but it’s accepting me anyway. Can you crank up the cooling on this thing? It’s like a Turkish bath in here.’

Jitendra and Jonathan exchanged words. Soya nodded and went to one side, out of Sunday’s field of view. A moment later she felt knocking and tapping as Soya fiddled with the suit’s backpack.

The faceplate continued to fog over, even as the air grew fractionally cooler than it had been before. Sunday wondered whether it was better to close her eyes than confront that misted-over glass only centimetres from her nose and mouth.

Then the mist began to clear. But just when the condensation had shrunk back almost completely around the faceplate’s borders, it greyed over again. Sunday was about to call out to Jitendra when she realised the greyness wasn’t more condensation; rather it had been caused by the head-up display obstructing her entire forward view. The head-up view was changing now, but the image that resolved wasn’t the room inside the Aggregate.

What she could see was a broken aeroplane.

It lay upside down, snapped wings scissored across its fuselage. Dust had gathered in its lee. The plane slumped on the crest of a gently sloping ridge, bone-white against a horizon of darkening butterscotch. More dust spilt from the ruptured eye of its bubble canopy. Sunday thought of her brother, that this was some dire vision of the Cessna, crashed and upended. But this was not Geoffrey’s aircraft.

To the right of the wreck, a hundred paces further up the shallow incline, sat a squat compound of pressure-tight huts. The huts’ rib-sided shells had been scoured to a grey metal sheen by dust storms. Dust had also built up in their wind-shadows. Faded almost to illegibility was a hammer-and-sickle flag. A wind gauge, its cups as large as washbasins, whirred atop the roof of the largest hut.

Sunday found her point of view moving towards the aircraft. Acting independently of her volition, her line of sight dipped as if she was kneeling to peer into the inverted bulge of the shattered canopy. The seat was upside down, the buckled harness dangling open where it had been released. The cockpit was empty.

Her point of view turned from the aircraft, again without her direction, and approached the cluster of huts. The significance of the weather station and the smashed aeroplane was unavoidable. It was here, on the slopes of Pavonis Mons, that Eunice had landed and then sought shelter during a particularly ferocious storm. The plane had been intact when she brought it down, but had subsequently been plucked from its moorings by the winds, upended and crushed like a paper toy.

The station and the plane were gone now, but the documented fact of this episode had been the only thing pointing to a specific part of the terrain around the Martian volcano. Sunday already knew this. She could not have found the helmet without already making this connection.

So what did Eunice want with her now?

Metal steps, the lower treads buried in dust, led to the airlock in the largest of the Russian huts. The outer door and its interior counterpart were both open. Sunday’s point of view ascended the steps.

Inside, it was brightly lit and wrong: physics and common sense were in dreamlike abeyance. It was not the interior of a Russian weather station on Mars but an annexe of the household. The light blazed in through square, thick-walled windows at a steep slant. It fell on recognisable furniture: chairs and tables, rugs and hangings, white-plastered walls. There were ornaments on the tables, dust-glints trembling in the air. In place of one wall, silk curtains billowed. Sunday would have been drawn to the curtains even if she’d had control of the suit’s point of view.

A gloved hand reached out and parted the curtains. She pushed on through.

Outside it was Africa.

It was somewhere near dusk, some season when the skies held an abundance of clouds, gaudy with underlit colours: salmon-pink, vermilion, rare shades of rose and tangerine. Between the clouds, improbably, the slashes of clear sky were luminous cobalt. The trees, darkly silhouetted, reminded her of toy-theatre cut-outs.

The view tracked around. Kilimanjaro slid into sight, snowless. The household, blue-tiled and white-plastered, the walls reflecting sky in a hundred pastel combinations. A flight of cranes, like birds in a Chinese watercolour.

A stand of trees, more solid and real-looking than the silhouettes. Her point of view commenced towards that place of shelter. And the woman who had been leaning with her back against one of the trees, sitting down as she read in the last light of some long-gone day, made to stand up, neither hurriedly, as if she had been disturbed, nor languidly, as if she had all the time in the world. As if this was simply the ordained moment.

The figure rested one hand on her hip. The other grasped the book she had been reading, resting against her thigh. She wore riding pants and boots, and a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up to bony elbows. The blouse looked very much like the one Soya had been wearing.

‘Good evening, Sunday,’ the woman said.

‘How do you know my name?’ Sunday asked, wondering what she was dealing with.

‘You told me, just now, when you answered the helmet’s questions. Do you understand what I am?’

‘Not really.’

‘When I buried this helmet on Mars, it was already forty years old. I had its systems upgraded as best I could, but there were still limitations to what could be achieved. You are not interacting with Eunice Akinya, rather with a very simple model of her, with a limited range of responses and a very restricted internal knowledge base. Don’t go mistaking it for me.’

‘So . . . this is you speaking now?’

‘This is . . . an interactive recording, a message to you, whoever you may be. The sphinxware wouldn’t have admitted you unless you’d uncovered the trail that led to this point, so the chances are excellent that you’re a member of the family, or at least someone with close ties to it.’

‘As you just said, I’ve told you who I am.’

‘You have, and we shall proceed on that basis.’ Eunice – the recording of Eunice – glanced down at the book she’d been reading. ‘Firstly, you’ve done well to come this far. That took resourcefulness. I trust there were no particular unpleasantnesses along the way?’

‘You could have picked a better burial site on Mars.’

Eunice’s eyes sharpened. ‘There were local difficulties?’

‘This is the middle of the fucking Evolvarium, Grandmother.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. Evol-what? Succinctly, please.’

‘Other than burying your helmet in a minefield, you couldn’t have picked a worse spot on Mars. This whole area, for a thousand kilometres in any direction, is a no-go zone. It’s a place where self-replicating machines are allowed to run riot. They evolve through generations, fighting for survival. Every now and then that evolutionary process throws up some gimmick, some idea or gadget that someone can make money from outside the ’varium. The machines are dangerous, and the people who run the place don’t take kindly to outsiders poking around. Our guide was killed out there, and Jitendra and I came close to dying as well.’

‘I’m . . . sorry.’ The contrition sounded genuine. ‘I meant you to be challenged, but not put in real peril. Still, I can’t be held accountable for what happened to Mars after the burial.’ Again there was that sharpening of her gaze. ‘It’s an odd thing to happen, though. This is the only place like it on Mars?’

‘I told you, you couldn’t have picked a worse location.’

‘Then that’s strange. I’m not one for coincidences, Sunday. Not this kind, anyway. There must be an explanation.’

‘You tell me.’

‘I only know what I know. But how could my little adventure on Pavonis Mons have led to this?’ She gave every impression of thinking about that, reopening the book and leafing through it, scratching her fingernail against the fine Bible-thin paper, even though her eyes were not on the close-printed text. ‘After I lost the aeroplane . . . but no.’ A quick dismissive head-shake. ‘That can’t be it.’

‘What can’t be what?’

‘I had to take shelter while the storm raged. The Russian station was still airtight, and it had power and the basic amenities. But I couldn’t stay there for ever. The wind had damaged the aircraft, but I still needed a way out.’

Sunday issued a terse, ‘Continue.’

As if Eunice needed permission.

‘The Russians had left a lot of equipment in their station, some of it still semi-functional. Before landing, I’d scouted a number of abandoned facilities and assets in the area. If I could salvage some of that junk, I’d be able to keep myself alive longer. Batteries, air-scrubbers, that kind of thing. Maybe even rig up some kind of repair to the aircraft. But I couldn’t go out there. My suit wasn’t stormproof, and in any case it only had limited range. I couldn’t have walked far enough to do any good.’

‘So you were in deep shit.’

‘Until I found the robots.’ Eunice snapped the book shut again. ‘The Russians had left them behind, in one of the storage sheds. I’m not surprised: they were old, slow, their programming screwed. Still, I didn’t need them to do much for me.’ She smiled quickly, as if abashed at her own resourcefulness. ‘I . . . patched them together, fixed their programming as best I could. Took me eight days, but it kept my mind off the worst. Then I sent them out in different directions, running on maximum autonomy. I’d told them to locate anything that looked potentially useful and drag it back to me.’

‘I guess it worked.’

‘No – rescue came sooner than I anticipated. The storm cleared, and my people were able to get me out. As for the robots . . . I forgot about them. But they were still out there, running with my lashed-up programming. They were supposed to take care of themselves, and to act competitively if the need arose. Do you think . . . ?’

‘Do I think you inadvertently created the Evolvarium? I’d say yes, if I wasn’t worried that your ego might already be on the point of stellar collapse.’

Eunice dislodged a fly from her brow. ‘I’ve achieved enough by intent, without dwelling on the things I made happen by accident. Regardless, I’m truly sorry if circumstances were more complicated than I envisaged, but it appears you weathered the adversity. Congratulations, Sunday. You’ve come through very well.’

‘My brother and I have been sharing the burden.’

‘And does that mean you have the full authority of the family behind you?’

‘I wouldn’t go that far, no.’

‘I never counted on it. The important thing is that you’ve demonstrated the necessary insight and determination to make it this far.’ Eunice lifted her head to study the sun. ‘My internal clock tells me that more than sixty years have passed since the burial. Is that really the case?’

‘Yes,’ Sunday said. ‘And you’ve only just died. The reason I’m here is because of an audit the household ran just after your death.’

‘A long time in anyone’s book. How have things been, while I was gone?’

‘With the family?’

‘Everything. The world, the flesh and the devil. Us. Have we managed not to screw things up completely?’

‘I’m here,’ Sunday said. ‘That should tell you something, shouldn’t it?’

‘I was born in 2030,’ Eunice said. ‘People told me it was the best and worst of times. To me it just seemed like the way of the world. Whether you’re born with famine in your belly or a silver spoon in your mouth – it’s always just the way things are, isn’t it? You know no different. Later, I realised I was fortunate, extraordinarily so. Fortunate to have been born African, for one thing, in the right place at the right time. My mother and father always said we should make the best of things, so that’s what we did. The world still had some catching up to do, mind. I grew up with the last wars ever fought on Earth. They never touched me directly, but no one could entirely escape their influence. Please tell me they were the last wars. I couldn’t bear to think we’d slipped back to our bad old ways.’

‘There haven’t been any more wars, which is not to say things are perfect back on Earth. I tease my brother about it often enough. They still have police, armies and peacekeeping forces, the occasional border incident. But it’s not like it used to be.’

‘The Resource and Relocation crisis taught us to grow up,’ Eunice said. ‘We were like a house full of squabbling children for most of our history. And then the house started burning down. We had to grow up fast or burn with it.’

‘We did.’

‘What is it like out there now? Have you seen much of the system?’

‘Not much. I was born on Earth, but I’ve spent most of my adult life on the Moon. This is the first time I’ve ever been anywhere else.’

‘You never had the means?’

‘It’s . . . complicated.’ Sunday nodded at the book her interlocutor was holding. ‘Is that Gulliver’s Travels?’

Eunice glanced absent-mindedly at the title. ‘Finnegans Wake,’ she said. ‘I liked Swift when I was little. Maybe Gulliver turned me into an explorer. But this is . . . denser. I still haven’t got the bottom of it. So many questions. You could spend a lifetime on it and still not understand it.’ She flicked open a random page, frowned at something written there. ‘Who was Muster Mark? What do you suppose he wanted with three quarks?’

‘I don’t know.’ Sunday was ready to leave the suit now. ‘What’s this all about, Eunice? Why did you bury the helmet? Why are you asking me these things?’

‘You disappoint me, Sunday. To have so much of the world ready for the taking, and to have seen so little of it. I thought wanderlust ran in our blood. I thought it was the fire that made us Akinyas.’

‘You saw it all, and then you came back, a sad old woman with no interest in anything except money and power and lording it over the rest of us. Doesn’t that suggest all that exploring was really just a waste of time?’

‘It would, if it hadn’t changed me.’ The book’s leather binding offered a creak of complaint as she shut it. ‘I’ve seen marvellous things, Sunday. I’ve looked back from the edge of the system and seen this planet, this Earth, reduced to a tiny dot of pale blue. I know what that feels like. To think that dot is where we came from, where we evolved out of the chaos and the dirt . . . to think that Africa is only a part of that dot, that the dot contains not just Africa, but all the other continents, the oceans and ice caps . . . under a kiss of atmosphere, like morning dew, soon to be boiled off in the day’s heat. And I know what it feels like to imagine going further. To hold that incredible, dangerous thought in my mind, if only for an instant. To think: what if I don’t go home? What if I just keep on travelling? Watching that pale-blue dot fall ever further away, until the darkness swallowed it and there was no turning back. Until Earth was just a blue memory.’

Sunday’s scorn was overwhelming. ‘You never had the nerve.’

‘Maybe not. But at least,’ Eunice answered mildly, ‘I’ve stood on the edge of that cliff and thought about jumping.’

‘I came to Mars. Isn’t that adventurous enough for you?’

‘You’ve only taken baby steps, child. But I can’t fault your determination. After all, you found me.’

‘Yes. And where has that got me?’

‘To this point. And I’m not done with you yet. Not by a long mark. There’s a choice that needs to be made, a difficult one, and in all conscience I just don’t have the mental capacity to make it.’

‘That’s uncharacteristically modest of you.’

‘Oh, I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about this thing I’ve become: this bundle of clanking routines stuffed into a hundred-year-old space helmet. That won’t suffice, not when so much is at stake. That’s why I’m going to leave matters in your hands. Return to Lunar space. Go to the Winter Palace, if it’s still there.’

‘It is.’

‘If you’ve managed to find the helmet, then you’ll get past the sphinxware guarding the Palace. And if you are, as you say, Akinya . . . then the rest will follow.’ She paused. ‘At some point, you will be challenged by more sphinxware. The answer you give will be critical. But I can’t tell you what that answer should be. I’ve been buried under Mars for sixty years.’

‘And that’s meant to be helpful . . . how, exactly?’

Her eyes twinkled. ‘Forewarned is forearmed.’

‘Thank you,’ Sunday said, drenching her answer with as much sarcasm as she could muster.

‘I wish I could tell you more, but the simple fact is that I only know the things I need to know, here and now. Yet wisely or otherwise I have faith in you, Sunday Akinya.’

‘You just told me you’re a bunch of routines stuffed into a helmet. How could you possibly know whether I’m up to the task?’

‘Because you remind me of me,’ Eunice said.

‘You mean, up my arse with my own divine self-importance?’

‘It’s a step in the right direction.’

Sunday took deep and grateful gulps of air. Her clothes were soaked with sweat, sticking to her as she was extricated from the suit.

‘I hope that wasn’t too traumatic,’ Jonathan said, pushing a glass into Sunday’s clammy hand.

‘You’ve had the helmet all this time, yet in sixty years you never figured out a way to break through the sphinxware?’ She drank the glass down in one go. ‘Even if you couldn’t do it, surely someone else would have been able to?’

‘There might have been a way,’ Jonathan said, ‘but would the risk have been worth it? If the helmet sensed it was being hacked, it might have erased its contents. Besides, it didn’t really interest me.’

‘I can’t believe that.’

‘You have to remember that I was the one who bored your grandmother. When she’d grown restless of Mars, I was happy to put down roots. The helmet was from that other part of her life, the part I had nothing to do with.’

Soya dabbed Sunday’s forehead with a cloth.

‘Then why dig it up?’ Sunday asked.

‘I still wanted to make sure it reached the right hands. If that meant acting as a curator, so be it. If I hadn’t, the machines would have recycled it decades ago.’

‘You can’t argue with that,’ Soya said.

‘No, but I’m not sure what either of us has achieved. Yes, there was a message from Eunice in the helmet, and it told me some stuff. But answers? All she gave me was some cryptic horsepiss about something being a blessing or a curse. She wouldn’t say which. Other than that I need to get to the Winter Palace, which is back where I started.’

‘She dragged you all the way to Mars . . . to tell you the answer is on your doorstep?’ Jitendra asked.

‘I don’t know what she was telling me.’ Sunday accepted another glass of water from Jonathan. She was beginning to feel human again, save for the lingering aches and pains where the suit had been squeezing her. ‘There was some stuff about looking back at Earth, seeing it from all the way out.’ She paused and said doubtfully, ‘Maybe there’s more it can tell me.’

‘You want to get back in that thing?’ Jitendra asked, with what struck her as a particularly touching concern for her well-being.

‘Maybe, when we’re back in aug reach, the construct can find a way in without tripping the sphinxware to self-erase. But we have to leave the Evolvarium for that. She thinks she might have created this place, by the way. By accident!’

‘She was here,’ Jitendra admitted. ‘No one can argue with that. And when all this is over, someone really needs to dig around and find out how the Evolvarium got started. Maybe I’ll do it.’

‘You’ll ruffle a few feathers,’ Soya said.

‘Good. It’s about time.’

‘That’ll have to wait, I’m afraid,’ Sunday said. ‘I need to get a message to Geoffrey, very urgently. Even if I left Mars right now, I’m still more than a month from home. That’s too long. One of us needs to look inside the Winter Palace before Hector or Lucas gets the same idea.’

‘We can reach Vishniac by tomorrow morning,’ Soya said.

‘Cross the Evolvarium at night?’

‘It’s safer when you have friends in the right places,’ Jonathan said. There was a gleam in his eyes that didn’t belong in a man that old. ‘Trust Soya – she’ll get you back in one piece. But promise me something – this won’t be the last time we speak, will it?’

‘We’ve barely begun,’ Sunday said.

‘Count on it,’ Jitendra said. ‘Even if she doesn’t come back, I will. I’m serious about ruffling those feathers. And I have a feeling there’s a lot you and I could talk about.’

‘I think so too,’ Jonathan said. Then he frowned slightly, turning back to Sunday. ‘What you said just now, about it all being horsepiss?’

‘What?’ Sunday asked.

‘Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you sounded just like your grandmother.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Geoffrey heard his own footsteps through the suit’s auditory-acoustic pickup and the timbre was different now, each footfall accompanied by a distinct steel-edged echo. The open door had shown only darkness, and it was no lighter now that they were on the other side of it, cut off from the Quaynor. He felt as if he’d climbed into the hold of a ship: some huge metal-walled void with no windows.

‘There’s an image-intensifier mode on these things,’ Jumai said, quietly, as if there were things astir that she did not wish to alert. ‘Voke amplification, see what you make of it.’

Jumai was never more than arm’s reach away, her form outlined on the helmet’s display. Geoffrey did as she had suggested, voking the suit to apply a light-enhanced overlay. Grey-green perspectives raced away from him, curving in one direction, arrow-straight in the other. He pivoted around, Jumai manifesting as a blazing white smudge. The floor angled up behind her, commencing its great steepening arc, the arc that would eventually bring it soaring overhead and back down behind him. At right angles to the direction of curvature, the floor stretched all the way to the far endcap. He couldn’t see anything of the endcap. There wasn’t enough ambient light for that.

‘This isn’t right,’ he said, shaking his head inside the helmet. ‘It shouldn’t be like this.’

‘You want to let me in on what you were expecting?’

‘I’ve never been here before,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but I’m very familiar with this space – from whenever she talked to us, whenever she delivered one of her sermons.’ The words were a struggle. ‘This wasn’t just an empty shell. It was full of trees, full of greenery and light. Like a jungle. There were plants, borders, paths and stairs. It rained. There should be a whole closed-cycle ecology running in here.’

‘Looks more like a big room full of nothing to me,’ Jumai said.

‘Arethusa was here. She chinged aboard, not long before Eunice died. She’d have noticed anything strange. She’d have said something to me.’

Jumai had her hands on her hips. She was looking up, towards the central axis of the empty chamber. ‘Least there’s a ship. That is a ship, isn’t it?’

‘I think so.’ But he could hardly tell. It was nearly seventy-five metres away. All he could make out was a spine of organised darkness running from one end of the chamber to the other. ‘We need more light,’ Geoffrey said decisively. ‘Is there a flashlight mode somewhere? I’m surprised it hasn’t cut in automatically.’

‘Maybe there are situations where you wouldn’t want that to happen. Wait a second.’ Jumai reached up and started fiddling with the crown of her helmet. ‘Thought I saw something while we were suiting up. Got some flares in my toolkit, all else fails.’

Light blazed from her helmet. She doused the blue-white beam against the central axis, picking out details of the Winter Queen. Geoffrey felt his world lurch slightly back into sanity, if only for a few lucid moments. He was still reeling from the absence of the jungle. Even if the air in the chamber had been swapped for pure oxygen and allowed to consume itself, there’d still be ashes . . . scorching. Yet there was nothing. The flooring under his feet had the improbable antiseptic gleam of an airpod showroom.

But the ship was real. He’d activated his own helmet lamp and was sweeping the beam along the nearest part of the Winter Queen. The deep-space explorer was a kilometre long, and even though part of that length was now absorbed into the endcaps, he still couldn’t see more than a fifth of it. Yet the anatomy was unmistakable, from the cluster of fuel tanks above him to the delicate filigreed spine with its branching black complexity of fractally folded radiator vanes.

He’d seen this ship a thousand times, in countless family histories. Everything about it looked correct. But this wasn’t the rotting, rusted, tree-encased carcass he’d been expecting. Winter Queen wasn’t garlanded with humid green overgrowth and she wasn’t laced with solar lights and an irrigation system. There were no spiral staircases rising from the floor to puncture her hull. She did not look as if she’d been stuck in here for decades.

She looked ravishingly, sparklingly new.

‘Enough of this shit,’ Jumai said. Her glowing form reached down and scooped something out of the holdall she’d dropped at her feet. She did something to the object in her hand and it quickened into impossible brilliance.

She tossed the little ball of light along the floor, where it bounced and rolled and then began to propel itself with a curious willingness, until it came to a rolling stop two or three hundred metres away.

Jumai did the same thing with a second flare.

They lit the entire chamber. Geoffrey squinted against the brightness until his eyes amped down their response. His suspicions were confirmed now: the ship looked as pristine as its surroundings. The two opposed centrifuge arms, one hundred and eighty metres from tip to tip, were still turning, whooshing around like the blades of a wind turbine. The capsule-shaped living pods at either end of the arms skimmed the ground with only a metre or so to spare.

‘Why are they still turning?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘There’s already gravity in this place.’

Jumai looked at the swinging arms. ‘How fast are we spinning?’

Geoffrey recalled what he’d learned on the approach. ‘About three times a minute, give or take.’

‘Then they’re not spinning fast enough to counteract the habitat’s rotation, either. I thought maybe someone had gone to a lot of trouble to recreate weightlessness, for whatever reason. But that’s not it. Those arms can’t be swinging around faster than once every couple of minutes, relative to us.’

‘Must be a systems glitch, then,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Something inside blew a fuse and the arms started up again. Or maybe it’s just to keep the air circulating, like a god’s own ceiling fan.’

Jumai scratched the back of her helmet, as if she had an itch. ‘Air’s breathable, you realise. Someone went to that much trouble. But I’m beginning to wonder if anyone ever actually put that to the test.’

‘Memphis would have breathed it.’

‘If he ever came this far. And if he did . . . well, he lied to you, didn’t he? Big time.’

Geoffrey wasn’t keen to follow that thought to its conclusion. ‘I see something,’ he said. ‘High above us, under the path of the centrifuge arms.’ He pointed, and Jumai followed his gaze to the indistinct form he’d sighted, pinned to the ceiling like a squashed fly.

‘Got to be Hector.’

‘He’s not moving.’ Somewhere in the suit there had to be a mode for zooming in the faceplate view, but Geoffrey couldn’t be bothered searching for it now. ‘I wonder if he even knows we’re here. There’s no aug reach, but suit-to-suit comms are still good . . .’ He didn’t want to voice the possibility that Hector might be dead, however plausible that now looked.

Jumai grabbed the holdall and broke into a surprisingly loose-limbed run, the suit easily accommodating her intentions. Geoffrey followed, keen to reach his cousin but anxious about what they might find. Whatever had hurt Hector might still be present. But where could anything or anyone hide, in this vast empty space? Unless Hector’s attacker had retreated back into the far endcap wall, the only possible hiding place was the ship itself.

He didn’t like that idea at all.

Even running against the spin of the habitat, Geoffrey didn’t feel his own weight varying to any perceptible degree. They cut diagonally, Jumai tossing out another flare along the way, and slowed to a walk when they were about a hundred metres from the suited figure. The centrifuge booms were still turning, and now that they were closer there was a clear whoosh each time one of the capsules swept by them. The arms were not moving particularly quickly – scarcely more than running pace, compared to the floor – but Geoffrey nonetheless had an impression of enormous, dangerous momentum.

Hector – who else could it possibly be? – was on his back, spreadeagled and motionless, staring straight up towards the central axis and the Winter Queen. Next to him, resting on the ground, was a white rectangular box like a big first-aid kit. Traceries of luminous arterial red ran down the suit’s matte-black limbs and defined the form of the chestplate and helmet. The Akinya Space logo glowed on the upper shoulder joint of the nearest arm.

Geoffrey approached the form, always keeping the centrifuge arms in view. As one of the capsules sped past him, he grasped what must have happened to his cousin. There was a door in the capsule: a dark circular aperture in the leading hemisphere.

‘Hector was trying to get inside.’

‘Figures,’ Jumai said slowly. ‘I mean, he would, wouldn’t he? Comes this way, finds things aren’t the way they’re meant to be . . . what else is he going to do but try to get aboard the ship?’ She took a step back as the other capsule whooshed by. ‘Think this was a surprise to him?’

Geoffrey had no adequate answer for that, only intuition. ‘I don’t like Hector,’ he said. ‘Don’t trust him, either. But I don’t think he was expecting to find this place empty.’ He got up close to Hector’s visor, trying to make out the face behind the glass.

There wasn’t one.

‘The suit’s empty.’

Jumai knelt down and double-checked, as if he could possibly have been mistaken. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘He must have removed the suit, then told it to wait here for him. That’s what it’s doing – just lying there, waiting.’

‘I know there’s air in here, but why would anyone be lunatic enough to get out of a perfectly good spacesuit?’

Geoffrey looked at the next centrifuge pod to swing past them, at the tiny door in its side. A suited figure could squeeze through that aperture – there’d have been little point in having it otherwise – but it would have been all but impossible to time the transition from floor to moving component. Unencumbered by a suit, though . . . and for a man who was fit and agile enough to play both tennis and polo and excel at both . . . Geoffrey wondered.

‘I think he wanted to get aboard the ship. He couldn’t do it with the suit on: too sluggish, too clumsy. So he got out of it. Told it to wait here, until he was ready to leave.’

‘We haven’t seen him,’ Jumai said. ‘There’s another way out of the Winter Palace, of course.’

‘But he wouldn’t have left without putting the suit back on. I think he’s still inside the ship.’

Cautiously, as if he might be working a jack-in-the-box, Geoffrey eased open the cover on the white container and saw four small cylindrical devices, packed like stubby beer bottles. There were four empty spaces next to them. He tugged one of the plump cylinders out of its cushioned support matrix.

It was heavy and cold, with a sturdy flip-up arming mechanism built into the cap. The label was in Swahili, with other languages printed underneath in smaller type. ‘“Caution: metastable metallic hydrogen,”’ he read. ‘“This is a variable-yield explosive device. Do not tamper with, shock or expose to temperatures in excess of four hundred kelvin, magnetic fields in excess of one tesla, or ambient pressures in excess of one hundred atmospheres. If found, immediately notify Akinya Space, Deep-System Resources.”’

‘You don’t think he came with just the four, do you?’ Jumai said.

‘Perhaps. On the other hand, maybe he took the other four into the ship.’

‘And set the fuses. And then issued a distress call, because something happened to him in there.’ Jumai was speaking very slowly, as if she did not much care for the direction her thoughts were taking her. ‘Something that meant he couldn’t get back out again on his own.’

‘We might be in trouble,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You think those charges would be enough to blow up the whole habitat?’

‘Don’t need to be. There’s a nuclear drive inside the ship.’ He turned the demolition charge around, studying the fine settings around the flip-up arming device. There was a twist dial and a locking fail-safe. Tiny numerals were engraved into the twist dial. ‘Must be a way to trigger these remotely. But there’s also a timer mode. It goes ten, twenty, thirty, sixty, ninety.’

‘Seconds or minutes?’

‘Minutes, I hope.’ Geoffrey slid the charge back into the box, treating it as gingerly as he would a Ming vase. ‘We don’t know that he set the timers, but it’s a possibility we can’t ignore.’

‘He called in the Kinyeti more than an hour ago,’ Jumai said. ‘If he armed those fuses and then ran into trouble . . . it can’t be the sixty-minute fuse. But that still doesn’t give us a lot of time to get out of here. We should start back now, and tell the Quaynor to pull away as soon as we’re in the lock.’

‘That’s an excellent idea.’ Geoffrey voked through visor menus until he found the option for suit removal. Typically, there were eight or nine hurdles to jump before the suit accepted that he really, honestly meant to get out of it. ‘But one of us has to go up there and get Hector. I’ll disarm the fuses if I’m able; otherwise I’ll find him and get the two of us out of there as quickly as possible. And if I can’t save Hector, I’ll save myself.’

‘No,’ Jumai said. ‘That’s not how it’s going to happen. And we don’t have time to argue about it.’

Geoffrey’s suit had begun to detach itself, opening like a crafty puzzle to reveal the human prize at its heart. The air in the chamber hit his lungs: he’d seen no point in holding his breath, so he gulped it down eagerly. Beyond a brief coughing fit triggered by the air’s coldness, there were no ill-effects.

‘Listen carefully,’ he told Jumai. ‘If Hector’s hurt in any way, he won’t be much use in that suit. I can carry him back the way he came in, if it comes to that, and he can get me through any doors we meet on the way – he passed through them on his way here, after all. But there’s no way I’d be able to get him up that shaft we already came down.’

‘So how the hell do you get out?’

‘Hector’s ferry. There’ll be room aboard for both of us.’

He put a hand on the armoured swell of her shoulder joint, before she could voice an objection. ‘I’m not suicidal, Jumai. But I can’t just leave him to die aboard that ship. As soon as you’re back in aug reach, tell Mira and Arethusa to decouple and get away as quickly as possible. The Pans’ll wait for you, or leave one of the Quaynor’s own escape pods docked at the hub for you to use. If all else fails, vent the airlock and use the explosive decompression to push you away from the station. It’ll only take you a few minutes to reach safe distance: I may not know much about spaceflight, but I know there are no shockwaves in vacuum, and the debris cloud will attenuate very quickly.’

‘And you?’

‘This is the only way.’

‘It sucks.’

‘Yes, it does. But the more time we spend discussing this, the less time we have for making it work.’ Geoffrey raised his voice. ‘Go. Now. We’ll both be fine.’

Jumai hesitated, then started to retrace their steps. She turned back once or twice, but Geoffrey was waiting until she was gone before he chanced his luck with the centrifuge. If it went wrong, he didn’t want Jumai risking her own neck to save his.

He waited for the next pod to come around, studying it more closely than he had before. The aperture was in the front, as the pod travelled, but if he simply stood his ground and waited for it to arrive he’d be swatted aside like a fly. Better to run alongside it, as fast as he could, and spring aboard. He couldn’t match its speed, but he could reduce the relative motion to the point where he ought to be able to grab hold of the pod without being injured or flung aside. There were handholds around the pod’s circumference: they’d been put there for weightless operations but they would serve his purpose equally well.

When he was certain that Jumai was either out of the chamber or far enough away that she couldn’t see him, he stationed himself as close to the path of the pods as he dared. Divested of his suit, he felt the breeze as they passed. He gulped in deep cold breaths and began to jog. The next pod whisked past his right shoulder – it was moving faster than he’d anticipated. He increased his pace, transitioning from a jog to a run. He kept his eyes on the ground, tracking a fine seam in the floor, making sure he didn’t deviate more than a few centimetres either side of it. The next pod arrived: it was still fast, but he’d cut down the relative motion to the point where jumping aboard no longer appeared insanely impossible. His feet hammered the metal plates. He was not yet running at his limit, but he might have to sustain this pace for several minutes. When the next pod passed, he upped his speed again. His lungs began to hurt. Now the relative speed couldn’t be more than two metres a second, but this was not a pace he could sustain indefinitely. The pods had taken about two minutes to complete their revolutions before, but now they had to catch up with a moving reference point and the interval was closer to three minutes. He thought again of the timer fuses on the demolition charges. Was this madness, even attempting to get aboard the Winter Queen?

When the next pod came, he made his move. One chance only, he figured. If he was knocked to the ground, if his ankle twisted under him, he’d never have the strength to make a second attempt. Part of him hoped it would happen that way. Make a gesture, an effort to reach Hector . . . that would be sufficient, wouldn’t it? He could go home with a clear conscience, knowing he’d tried.

He grasped for the handhold with his right hand, and an instant later had his left in place as well. For a second or so he was able to keep pace with the pod, but then his legs buckled under him and he was being dragged. Putting as much strength into his arms as he was able, he levered himself further from the ground. He was facing back the way he’d come now, like a rider about to mount a horse, his heels skimming the floor. With a grunt of supreme effort he managed to hook his right leg onto one of the handholds, like a foot into a stirrup, and then his left leg followed. He was aboard the pod.

But not inside it. He was facing the wrong way, gripping the outside, one slip away from tumbling off. He twisted around, keeping his hands and feet where they were. The only thing in his favour was that he was now slightly lighter than when he’d been standing: the centrifuge’s own rotation was working against the overall spin of the Winter Palace.

Geoffrey adjusted his position. He moved his right hand onto the same handhold as the left, and then moved the left as far back over his shoulder as he was able without throwing himself dangerously off-balance. He caught his breath, knowing he could only hold the posture for a few seconds. He could not adjust the position of his legs unless he swung himself out into space again, holding on with just his hands. Taking another breath, calculating the movement he would have to make, rehearsing exactly where he would plant his feet when momentum brought him back into contact with the pod, he committed.

Something twisted in his wrist. The pain was intense, a dagger into a nerve, but it was also momentary. He forced himself not to let go, grunting away the discomfort. His left foot recontacted the pod, then his right. He scrambled for a more secure hold, his right heel sliding against the pod’s curving side.

Then he was safe.

Geoffrey allowed himself a minute to gather his energies before continuing. It was not difficult to reach the entrance hole, although it required care. Under other circumstances, knowing that something had already happened to Hector, he would have entered it with immense caution. Scarcely an option now. He swung himself inside, and as he hit the padded floor all he felt was the relief of no longer having to clutch on to the handholds. His wrist ached, his shoulder muscles were protesting, his legs were burning from the exertion.

But he was aboard the Winter Queen.

The pod’s interior was bathroom-sized. There were fold-down stools and a table, a couple of screens. Sufficient for a game of cards, but even without suits on, it would be very cramped in here with more than two people. The pods weren’t meant for extended habitation, though. The idea would be to spend a few hours per day under normal or even slightly higher than normal gravitation, to offset the calcium depletion and muscle wasting of prolonged weightlessness. Given that Eunice had been alone on her final deep-space voyage, elbow room had hardly been an issue.

He looked up, along the spoke that connected the pod to the spacecraft’s central axis. Ninety metres: more or less the same distance they’d already traversed after entering the habitat. There was a ladder, and just enough room for one person to climb it. Before cramp set in, he made a start on the ascent. His limbs protested, the ache in his wrist sharpening, but as he ascended, so his effective weight gradually decreased and the effort became endurable. Every ten metres or so the ladder reached a platform and swapped sides, so that there was no risk of falling all the way down. He wondered why they hadn’t arranged an elevator, but a moment’s consideration made it plain enough: the whole point of the centrifuge arm was to work bone and muscle. Climbing up and down was part of the exercise.

The air in the ship was free to mix with that in the chamber, but there was a metallic quality to it that he didn’t remember from before. It smelled antiseptic, like a hospital corridor that had been vigorously scrubbed and polished. Nor was it as cold as the air outside. In addition to the warmth, ship sounds were now reaching his ears. He heard the electric hum of what he presumed to be the centrifuge mechanism, and beyond that the muted chug of onboard life support and air circulation, like a showroom full of refrigerators.

Three minutes after commencing his ascent, Geoffrey was weightless again. He had reached the transition collar where the rotary movement of the centrifuge met the fixed reference frame of the main hull. An oval hole slid slowly by, rimmed with cushioning. Hector had come at least this far.

Geoffrey pushed himself through the hole the next time it appeared. There was ample time to complete the manoeuvre, and he didn’t doubt that there were safety mechanisms waiting to cut off the centrifuge’s rotation should he somehow imperil himself.

He floated into the lit core of the Winter Queen and assessed his surroundings.

He was amidships: aft lay the engine assembly and the nuclear power plant; fore lay the command deck. He was hanging in a corridor, hexagonal in cross section, with panels and lockers arranged in longitudinal strips. Between the strips were recessed ladders, grip-pads and handholds. The main lights were on, and everything looked very clean and tidy.

Not at all like a ship that had been to the edge of the solar system and back – much less one that had been lived in for sixty-odd years. Geoffrey picked at the edge of a striped warning decal, bordering what the glass pane identified as an emergency bulkhead control. Not even a hint of dirt around the edge of the decal. His own fingernails were grubbier.

Nothing stayed that new, not with human beings in the loop.

‘Hector!’ Geoffrey called. ‘Can you hear me?’

No answer. Not that that necessarily meant anything, since the ship was big and there were undoubtedly soundproof doors between its various internal sections. But which way had his cousin gone?

Tossing a mental coin, Geoffrey decided to check out the command deck first. Trusting his orientation, he set off down the corridor, using the handholds and straps for traction. He was glad he’d had time to adjust to weightlessness on the Quaynor.

The corridor jinked right, then left – squeezing past some fuel tank or external equipment module, he guessed – and then there was a door, blocking his path. A small window was set into the door, but all he could see through that was a short space and another door beyond it. Bracing himself, conscious that he wasn’t wearing a suit and that he had no reason to assume the entire ship was pressurised, he reached out and palmed what was obviously the door’s operating control. An amber light flicked to green and the door gapped apart in two interlocking halves.

He pushed through into the space beyond, the door closing almost before he’d cleared the gap. He arrested his drift and palmed open the second door. There was air beyond. He continued his exploration.

By his reckoning, Geoffrey thought he must be halfway to the front of the ship by now. The corridor he was moving along was wider than the others, and there were rooms – or more properly compartments – leading off from it. He spared them the briefest of glances as he passed. Most were large enough to serve as private chambers for individual crewmembers, and indeed one or two came equipped with bunks and other fold-out amenities. But again there was no sign that anything had ever been used. He passed a couple of larger chambers, a dining area, a commons room, a sickbay – all the chrome and pea-green equipment gleaming and shrink-wrapped, as if it had just been ordered out of the catalogue and installed yesterday. A zero-gee gym, a kind of cinema or lecture theatre. More storage lockers and equipment bays. Lots of equipment: spacesuits, vacuum repair gear, medical and food supplies, even a couple of stowed proxies, waiting to be called into service. The proxies were surprisingly modern-looking for a ship that hadn’t gone anywhere since 2101.

Did they even have proxies back then? Geoffrey wondered.

He moved on. Around him the ship chugged and whirred and clicked. It was much warmer now, almost uncomfortably so, and Geoffrey was beginning to sweat under the spacesuit inner layer. He passed a pair of large eggshell-white rooms furnished with hibernation cabinets: streamlined sarcophagi. They were Hitachi units, plastered with medical logos, instructions and graphic warning decals. There were six cabinets.

Which made no sense at all.

Winter Queen had made many journeys with a normal operating staff, but for her final mission Eunice had taken the ship out alone. There had been good reasons for that: automation and reliability had improved to the point where the vehicle could easily manage its own subsystems and damage repair, and beyond that Eunice had not wanted to involve anyone else in what was unarguably a risky enterprise, taking her much further out, and for longer, than any previous deep-space expedition.

That, of course, and her natural unwillingness to share the limelight.

But mass was fuel, and fuel was speed, and speed was time. Eunice would never have hauled the deadweight of five extra hibernation units and their associated mechanisms – many tonnes, Geoffrey guessed – if she only needed one for herself. Winter Queen had been outfitted and modified for each of its journeys. There was no reason for all that mass to have been left aboard.

Pushing questions from his mind for the moment, Geoffrey continued along the spine of the ship. He passed through another set of pressure doors, and before him lay the command deck. It was windowless: more like the tactical room of a warship than an aircraft’s cockpit. Windows had little utility on a deep-space vehicle like this; it could steer and dock itself autonomously, and relay any external view to its crew via screens or aug-generated figments.

The ship was dreaming of itself. Screens and readouts wrapped the space like the facets of a wasp’s eye, seen from inside. Lines of housekeeping data scrolled in green and blue text, updating too quickly to read. Schematic diagrams fluttered from screen to screen in a constant nervous dance, reactor cross sections, fuel-management flow cycles. Other displays showed zoom-ins of the solar system at different scales: planets and moons, their paths around the sun, various trajectories and intercepts available to the ship at that moment, depending on fuel and time/energy trade-offs. Simulations and projections, executing in neurotic loops, with only tiny, trifling variations from run to run, everything changing and shuffling at a feverish pace. Geoffrey could take in the totality of it, but no single display held still long enough for him to grasp more than the sketchiest of details. One thing was clear, though: the ship still thought it was a ship.

There were three chairs in the command deck – bulky acceleration couches, heavy and high-backed – and for all that the displays snared his attention, it could not have taken Geoffrey more than five or ten seconds to notice that he was not alone.

In the middle chair was Hector.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘Where’s Dos Santos?’

‘Dos Santos ran into trouble answering your distress call. I’m your next best hope.’

‘Leave now,’ Hector told him.

Geoffrey propelled himself through the space. Between the displays were margins of padded walling set with handles and elastic hoops. His foot brushed one of the displays. It flexed, absorbing the pressure before gently repelling him.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked, facing Hector directly. ‘Why are you still aboard?’

‘Because I had to know,’ Hector said. ‘Because I had to fucking know. Why else? What happened to Dos Santos? Why are you here, cousin?’

Geoffrey’s eyes amped up to compensate for the low ambient lighting on the command deck. Hector wasn’t just sitting in the central command seat. He was strapped there, with a heavy X-shaped webbing across his chest and tough-looking restraints around his wrists and ankles. Like Geoffrey he was wearing only the inner layer of a spacesuit.

‘I’m here because I thought you might be in trouble,’ Geoffrey said, still trying to get his bearings. ‘The station attacked the Kinyeti – the crew’s still alive, but the ship’s a wreck. Jumai and I came aboard afterwards, using the other docking hub. We found the four demolition charges you left behind and assumed you’d come aboard with the others. Is that the case? Did you arm them?’

‘Not an issue now. There’s still eleven minutes on the fuses, if my timing’s right.’

Geoffrey shook his head. ‘How can that not be an issue? Tell me where the charges are – I’ll disarm them.’

‘Just leave. You still have a few minutes.’

‘You just said eleven minutes.’

‘Different countdown.’ Hector nodded, which was all he could do given the degree to which his movements were impaired. ‘The screen ahead of me. It’s the only one that hasn’t changed.’

Geoffrey followed his gaze with a peculiar kind of dread. He saw what Hector meant. Three sets of double digits: hours, minutes, seconds. The hours had reached zero. There were four minutes left, and a handful of churning seconds.

‘What the hell?’

‘It initiated as soon as I hit a certain level of the ship’s file system. Some kind of self-destruct, obviously.’ Hector sounded insanely calm and resigned, as if he’d had years to accept his fate. ‘I can’t get out of this chair – it’s locked me in. But you’ve still got time. You don’t need a suit, and the elevator’s still working to take you all the way back to the hub. Use my ferry – I assume it’s still docked.’

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.

‘How long?’ he asked. Then, sensing that the ship might need clarification: ‘For how long are propulsion and navigation control suspended?’

‘For the duration of the trip, Geoffrey.’

Hector looked at him, evidently sharing his profound unease at that answer. ‘State our destination, and the duration of the trip,’ he said.

‘Our destination is KBO 2071 NK subscript 789,’ the ship said. ‘Akinya Space Trans-Neptunian asset 116 stroke 133, codename Lionheart. Trip time will be fifty-two days.’

Hector listened to that and shook his head.

‘What?’ Geoffrey asked, growing impatient. ‘Is that the same place or not?’

‘It’s the same iceteroid where the ship was built. I remember the name, Lionheart. But that’s Trans-Neptunian, for pity’s sake. I’ve been as far out as Saturn, cousin. I know how long it takes, and fifty-two days won’t begin to cut it.’

Geoffrey could only nod. He knew how long it had taken the swiftship to get Sunday to Mars, and Mars was a hop and a skip away compared to Neptune’s orbit. ‘Eunice’s mission to the edge of the system took a lot longer than a hundred days, even allowing for the return time.’

‘More than a year. So either the ship is bullshitting us, for no reason at all, or . . .’ Hector didn’t seem to know where to go with that.

‘Or we’re on a very fast ship.’

‘Nothing’s that fast.’

‘Until now,’ Geoffrey said.

Behind them, the command deck doors opened. Geoffrey twisted around in his harness, straining to see past the bulk of his seat. His heart skipped at the sight of a proxy, looming in the doorway. It was one of the shipboard units he’d seen earlier – a man-shaped chassis constructed from tubes and joints.

It was cradling a body, and he recognised it.

‘This female has suffered minor concussion, but is otherwise uninjured.’ The proxy spoke with the voice of the ship. ‘Shall I convey her to the medical suite?’

Geoffrey unbuckled his harness. They were still accelerating, but the thrust appeared to have levelled out at around one gee. He could move around in that without difficulty, provided he took care. ‘Do so,’ he said.

‘I thought you said you were alone.’

‘I thought I was.’

Hector was in the process of undoing his own restraints when a ching request arrived. Geoffrey voked acknowledgement and placed Mira Gilbert’s head and upper torso in the middle of the command deck. He voked Hector in on the conversation.

‘Unless someone’s spoofing the return signal, you’re alive,’ Gilbert’s figment said. ‘We’ve been trying to establish contact since . . . well, whatever it was that happened. We’ll get to that in a moment. Are you all right?’

Geoffrey took a moment to decide how to answer that question truthfully. ‘I’m fine . . . for the time being. Beyond that, things become a little murky. I’m with Hector – he’s OK as well. Since you seem to be alive, I presume Jumai got word through?’

‘Jumai reached the point where she was able to signal us. She told us to undock immediately and execute a safe-distancing manoeuvre. I told her I’d wait until she was in the lock, but she insisted on going back inside.’

‘I know. We just found her.’

‘How is she?’

‘I’m guessing she made it onto the ship just before we departed. She must have been knocked around a bit, but the proxy tells me there isn’t anything seriously wrong with her.’

Gilbert’s figment nodded. ‘OK – next question. The habitat’s gone. Presumably you worked that much out for yourselves. How much control do you have over Winter Queen?’

‘None whatsoever, and by the way, this isn’t Winter Queen. It’s some other ship Eunice sent back in its place. Similar, but not the same. And there’s no sign that Eunice was ever here, either aboard this ship or anywhere in the Winter Palace.’

Hector shot him a warning look. ‘Any other family business you want to reveal, cousin?’

‘They already know more than you’d approve of – a little more won’t hurt.’

‘How can she not have been in the habitat?’ Gilbert asked. ‘Jumai said something similar, but we didn’t have time to get the full story out of her before she went off-air again.’

‘I don’t know,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘Obviously none of us ever dealt with Eunice except via ching . . . other than our housekeeper Memphis.’

‘All right. As important as that is, there are actually more pressing matters right now. You say you can’t control the ship – what have you tried?’

‘Everything,’ Hector said. ‘Flight plan’s locked in, and it won’t let us change anything.’

‘We’re tracking you, but we don’t have a handle on your trajectory yet. Where are you headed?’

‘If the ship’s to be believed,’ Geoffrey said, ‘an iceteroid in the Kuiper belt.’

Gilbert looked apologetic. ‘You won’t make it out of Earth–Moon space at this rate. You’re running way outside the safe operating envelope for that type of propulsion system.’

Hector looked sceptical. ‘You’ve figured that much out in just a few minutes?’

‘You’re lighting up near-Lunar space like a Roman candle. You need to find a way to throttle back, and urgently. At the very least, you’re going to burn so much fuel you won’t have a snowball’s hope of slowing down this side of the Oort cloud.’

‘The ship has its own ideas,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You’ll have to do something. You’ve already reached the point where no local traffic has enough delta-vee to catch up with you – and that includes Quaynor, I’m afraid.’

Geoffrey nodded, although a fuller understanding of the situation did not make it any easier to accept. ‘I need to check on Jumai. Maybe she can help us.’

‘We’ll keep reviewing the situation,’ the merwoman said. ‘In the meantime, good luck. I was about to wish you “godspeed”, but under the circumstances . . . maybe not.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Getting to the medical suite had been more difficult than Geoffrey had anticipated. The central corridor had become a plunging vertical shaft, one that could only be ascended or descended using the recessed ladders Geoffrey had noticed on his arrival. He’d wanted to go down alone – he’d tried to persuade Hector to stay on the bridge, monitoring the situation – but his cousin had been determined to accompany him. They had been able to secure themselves to handholds and grabs as they worked their way down, but the process had been time-consuming and fraught with hazard.

There was something troubling about the provision of the ladders, though. Whoever had decided they were necessary must have known that the ship would be accelerating hard. That, and the ship’s confident assessment of their trip time to Lionheart, made it all the more difficult to accept that the engine was malfunctioning.

Geoffrey should have been encouraged by that, but he wasn’t. He didn’t like the idea of being trapped aboard a ship that was already travelling too fast to be intercepted.

‘I don’t remember what happened,’ Jumai said, when the proxy had brought her round to consciousness and the ship had confirmed that her injuries were minor, the concussion having no long-term consequences. ‘I was outside . . . and now I’m not.’

‘You remember Winter Queen?’ he asked.

She considered his question for a moment before answering. ‘In the habitat, yes.’

‘You’re aboard it,’ Geoffrey said, before adding, ‘sort of.’

‘We’re prisoners,’ Hector stated gravely. ‘The ship has locked us out of its controls and we’ve been accelerating since we broke out of the Winter Palace. But it isn’t Eunice’s old ship, and we don’t really know where it’s taking us.’

‘We found your suit,’ Jumai said.

Hector nodded. ‘Geoffrey told me you both came aboard to find me. You were supposed to leave the station and get to safety before the charges blew. You remember the charges?’

She answered his question with one of her own: ‘What happened to them?’

‘I defused them,’ Geoffrey said. ‘But they were the least of our problems, as it turns out. The station was already counting down to its own demolition. It must have been designed this way, all those years ago – made to come apart, so that the ship could break out without damaging itself.’

‘Did you say this isn’t the Winter Queen?’ There was a notch in her brow – a frown, or the crease of a headache, or both.

‘It looks the same,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but it’s younger, and it was built on the edge of the solar system. It’s also . . . doing things. Stuff that ships don’t usually do, in my limited experience.’

‘Your grandmother was a piece of work, do you know that?’

Geoffrey managed a graveyard smile. ‘I’m coming round to that conclusion myself.’

‘The ship is accelerating too strongly,’ Hector said. ‘That’s what the people outside think, anyway. But clearly we’re still alive, and the ship looks as if it’s been designed to cope with this kind of thing.’

‘You think Eunice gave it some tweaks?’