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 Ki
nyeti’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.’