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, prov
ided 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.’