Her words were arriving too quickly, like tennis balls spat out by a service machine. Geoffrey tried to formulate a question. ‘How long?’
‘How long have we been under? Fifty-one days, as far as Hector and I can tell, which is exactly what we dialled in at the start. It’s early May. Isn’t that weird? I skipped a whole birthday while we were out.’
Geoffrey winced as the bioprobes withdrew from his skin. He tried using his arms. They barely felt like a part of him. He had spent some of the Earth-Moon journey unconscious, but nothing about that had prepared him for the fifty-one days he’d been under while the ship took them wherever it was headed. Nonetheless, his arms responded, albeit sluggishly.
‘Muscle tone shot to shit,’Jumai said. ‘What happens when you spend seven weeks weightless. The engine must have cut off within a few hours of us going under; we’ve been coasting most of the way, except for the slowdown at the end.’
Systems in the casket would have done their best to prevent muscle wastage and loss of bone density, but Geoffrey knew nothing was as effective as simply moving around under plain old gravity.
He fumbled his way free of one of the restraints and began to drift out of the casket. Jumai arrested his motion with a gentle application of the palm of her hand. ‘Easy does it, soldier.’
‘We’ve stopped?’ he asked. ‘We’re still a day out, aren’t we?’
‘Ship must have shaved a little time off its estimate. As far as Hector and I can tell, we’ve reached our destination. He’s trying to verify that it’s the same place the ship said it was. I can tell you one thing already.’
‘Which is?’
‘Whatever shit we have to deal with out here, dying of sunstroke isn’t going to be part of it.’
Half an hour later, Geoffrey had made his aching and uncoordinated way up front to join Jumai and Hector in the command deck. All three were buckled into their seats, even though the ship was now floating at rest. They had not needed to provide further blood samples, and what limited control they had possessed before going into hibernation was still theirs. The ship was even willing to let Jumai access some of its top-level systems. She had assigned external views to two of the displays: one showing the view back towards the inner system, the other of the object they were now holding station from at twenty kilometres.
It was the view back home that chilled Geoffrey the most. It was one thing to be aware that they were now beyond the orbit of Neptune, well into the long light-hours on the solar system’s edge. Travel far enough, and that was what happened. It was another thing entirely actually to see how pitifully small and faint the sun now looked from this distance.
Geoffrey had never been further than the Moon in his life. The sun was now more than thirty times as distant as it appeared from his home, and the light it offered was over nine hundred times fainter. It was a bullet hole punched in the sky, admitting a pencil-shaft of watery yellow illumination, too feeble to be called sunshine. For the first time in his life he truly understood that his home orbited a star.
And he felt some sense of the true scale of things. That bullet hole was still the brightest thing in his sky, but he could imagine it shrinking, diminishing, sphinctering tight as he fell further into the outer darkness. Until even that pencil-shaft became just a wavering trickle of ice-cold photons.
He smiled at that, because he had not even come a thousandth of a light-year.
The sun might have been the brightest thing in the sky, but it was not the largest. The iceteroid, which sat in the opposite direction – its visible face illuminated – was fifty kilometres across at its widest point. It was a dark-red potato, its hidelike surface only lightly cratered. Like all Kuiper belt objects, it had been ticking around the sun largely unmolested for more than four billion years. Once in a stupendous while, the gravitational influence of one of the major planets might kick a Kuiper belt object onto a cometary orbit. For the majority of objects, no such glory awaited. They would spend their existences out here, going about their lonely business until the sun swelled up. If, that was, humanity’s machines did not arrive first, to tap their riches.
‘Is it ours?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘If we are where the ship claims to be, then this is Lionheart,’ Hector said. ‘We should be able to cross-check that in a little while, but for the moment I see no reason to doubt it. We’ve come a long way, and that’s pretty obviously an iceteroid.’ He dragged his gaze from the display for a second to meet Geoffrey’s eyes. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘They say it gets easier.’
‘It does. But fifty-one days is a long stretch even for the seasoned space traveller. The cabinets are modern, though. There should be no lasting effects.’ He nodded at one of the schematic diagrams. ‘The ship has even redeployed its centrifuge arms. It wants us to be as comfortable as possible. We should all think about spending some time under gravity, even if we have to do it in shifts while someone monitors things from up here.’
‘You say the cabinets are modern,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Hitachi have been making them for a long while, but the ones we just used are not sixty-two years old.’
‘You said that’s how old the ship is,’ Jumai said.
‘Its basic systems are that old,’ Hector replied, ‘engine, hull, life-support, everything it needed to get back to Lunar orbit. Since then, though, it must have been outfitted with brand-new internal equipment. I suppose the cabinets may have been manufactured onboard, if the repair systems had the right materials and blueprints. But it’s far more likely that they were simply bought and shipped up to the Winter Palace.’
‘Without anyone in the family knowing?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘Only one person would have needed to know,’ Hector said, ‘and none of us would ever have had cause to question him.’
‘Memphis.’
‘Who better to supervise whatever provisions were needed? Materials and parts were being shipped up to the Winter Palace all the time, and not one of us batted an eyelid. How hard would it have been to slip six Hitachi hibernation caskets into one of those consignments? Hitachi would have had no reason to ask questions, and the units would have been installed by robots. Only Memphis would have had any real involvement.’
‘Memphis knew,’ Geoffrey said softly. ‘All this time. He knew.’
‘His loyalty to Eunice ran a lot deeper than we realised. He was ready to let the rest of us believe a lie because she asked him to. Even to the point of bringing back what we all thought were her ashes, and going through that whole scattering business.’ Hector was doing his best, Geoffrey saw, but he couldn’t quite keep the disgust out of his voice. He felt some of it himself. One thing to accept that Memphis had known things the rest of the family hadn’t. Another that he had been willing to lie to their faces, and put them all through . . . what, exactly?
He remembered Memphis meeting him, on the morning that the news of his grandmother’s death had come in. The cool, indigo-shadowed gatehouse; Memphis putting his arm around Geoffrey’s shoulders, offering strength and guidance when it was needed. All the while knowing that the Winter Palace not only did not contain a jungle, but had never been occupied. And if Eunice had not been living up there, and if the ashes Memphis had brought down were not hers, then what proof did they have that she had really died late last year?
‘The only remaining question,’ Hector went on, ‘is a simple one. Why?’
‘I can think of another,’ Geoffrey said, ‘although maybe they’re connected. If Eunice didn’t die in the Winter Palace, then where and when did she?’
‘You don’t even know for sure she’s dead,’ Jumai said quietly.
Geoffrey returned his attention to the iceteroid, shuttering out the thoughts he did not, for the moment, care to deal with. ‘So we just sit here, is that the idea?’
‘We can’t leave,’ Hector said. ‘All we have is short-range manoeuvring capability – enough to make final approach to Lionheart. I can’t believe that’s
accidental.’
‘The ship’s brought us this far,’ Jumai said. ‘Ball’s in our court now.’
Hector voked an enlargement, zooming in on the central portion of the iceteroid. ‘It’s rotating very slowly,’ he said, ‘but I’ve corrected for that. This is what we’d see if we were hovering above a fixed point on the iceteroid’s surface.’
The image switched through a series of colour enhancements, revealing surface detail. Spidering out from a central focus were the radial lines and scratches of concentric structures, like ancient crater walls. He voked another enlargement. The zoom jumped to reveal a sprawl of silver-grey grids and modules, pressed into the surface like a child’s building blocks into wet clay. The concentric lines were pipes and tunnels connecting the blocks, the radial arms magnetic catapults. The focus was the main production shaft, bored deep into the iceteroid.
‘What we’re seeing here is more or less what I expected,’ Hector said. ‘There are production assets like this on thousands of Kuiper belt objects, running day and night, fully automated, for decades on end.’
‘Is this one active?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘Wait a moment.’ Hector held up a finger, his lips moving slightly as if counting in his head. Then he jabbed the finger precisely. Geoffrey caught a glint of brightness at the end of one of the launchers.
An instant later something razored a cold blue line across the display.
Then the blue line hazed, feathering like a vapour trail. He watched it darken to black.
‘Package shot, on the nose,’ Hector said. ‘Once every ninety seconds. We’ve been tracking them since we got visual.’
‘A package of what?’
‘Processed ice, of course. Water, most likely, although it doesn’t have to be. Boosted at high-gee in a magnetic cradle, followed by a shove from ablative pusher lasers once it’s cleared the launcher. The lasers do most of the work. They can steer the package for quite some distance after launch by applying off-centred ablation. What you saw there was a vapour trail: the package’s own steam-rocket exhaust.’
There was pride in Hector’s voice; pride in a complex technical process working to plan. Geoffrey understood, or thought he did. Hector wasn’t just thinking of this one launch event, or even this one iceteroid. He wasn’t thinking of that single package, beginning its long fall home. He was thinking of the thousands of Akinya assets in the Kuiper belt, the tens of thousands more among the asteroids and iceteroids. Machines doing their work, tirelessly and efficiently, injecting ice and organics and metals into the vacuum, a corpuscular flow that most people barely knew existed. It didn’t matter that this one package would take years or decades to reach its customers. What mattered were the thousands, millions, just like it already on their way ahead. That was the grander machine right there: a single industrial plant wider than the orbit of Neptune. A web of conveyor belts, centred on the sun and its little clutch of warm, inhabited worlds.
Not just any industrial machine, either. One that his family had brought into being, with blood and toil over a hundred hard years. They had built this machine and made it tick and whirr like a Breitling.
The launcher flashed again. The vapour trail gashed an electric-blue wound across his sight.
‘Then we’re wrong,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Or this isn’t where the ship came from originally. If that iceteroid’s still being mined—’
‘That doesn’t prove anything,’ Hector said. ‘A cubic metre of processed water ice, every ninety seconds? That’s nothing compared to the mass of that ’roid. Even if we’d been tapping it for a hundred years, we’d only have extracted a few dozen megatonnes by now. Of course, the ice has to be refined, and some of it’s used for the fusion generators powering the launchers and mining gear . . . but we’re still talking about an insignificant fraction of the total mass.’
‘He means there’s still plenty of room for something else to be going on in there,’ Jumai said. ‘I think.’
‘This is just camouflage,’ Hector agreed, ‘to keep prying eyes from looking too closely.’
‘Until now,’ Geoffrey said.
The iceteroid’s slow rotation gave it many possible launcher trajectories. Depending on demand, there were few places in the system it couldn’t lob a package towards. Most of them would be aimed squarely at Mars, which was by far the biggest consumer of water ice and organics. A smaller fraction would be shot Moonwards, silvered with a monolayer of reflective insulation, or aimed at Saturn or the Jovian settlements. The gas giants might be used to slingshot or laser-steer payloads elsewhere, if demand patterns shifted in the intervening time.
What could be aimed at a point in the sky, of course, could always be aimed at an approaching ship.
‘We should be wary,’ Hector said, apparently following the same thought train as Geoffrey and reaching a similar conclusion.
‘Eunice arranged for us to come here,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We can be certain of that.’ But he could understand Hector’s trepidation. Hector had already run afoul of Eunice’s secret arrangements, and his own ship had been ripped to shreds by her hair-trigger defences. He did not need to have witnessed the attack on the Kinyeti to remain mindful of the possibilities.
‘Even if I trusted her not to screw up,’ Jumai said, ‘sixty years is a long time for stuff to keep working. She may have programmed this ship to return to Lionheart, and she may have programmed Lionheart to expect it. But what if some part of that plan didn’t make it through the intervening years in one piece?’
‘Do we have external comms?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘We can send and receive between us and Earth, if that’s what you mean,’ Jumai said. ‘There’s a message waiting for you, actually. Do you want to take it privately?’
He looked at Hector before answering. ‘I don’t think there are any secrets between us now, are there?’
‘Perhaps not,’ Hector said.
As he’d expected, the message was from Sunday.
‘I’ll keep this brief,’ her figment said. ‘If you’re where we think you are, round-trip time for this message is going to be close to ten hours. Firstly, I hope you’re all safe and well. We tracked your exhaust until the point when the engine shut off, by which time you were moving faster than any manned ship in history. We didn’t see your slowdown, but that’s to be expected: you’d have been firing away from us by then, and most of the radiation would have headed out of the system, not back towards us. We haven’t been able to tap into telemetry from the ship, but aside from its speed, it looked to be functioning normally. Of course, if you’re hearing this, we can presume that you’ve been brought out of hibernation. As to what you’ll find in Lionheart, I’m afraid I can’t give you much help. There’s a lot to catch up on, brother. I’m with Lucas now: he told me what happened in the Winter Palace. I’m back on Earth, too – you’ll know that from the quangle tags. I came back the fast way, on one of our own ships. What happened in the Evolvarium . . . it’s complicated, and I’m still not sure I understand it all.’
Sunday hesitated, before continuing: ‘The Pans cheated us, Geoffrey. Truro, Holroyd . . . the man I met on Mars. Whether that means we can’t trust them at all, or that we can still trust some of them . . . I don’t know yet. I think we can still trust Arethusa, and I don’t have any doubts about Chama and Gleb . . . but whether they still count as Pans is harder to say.’ She flashed a triumphant grin. ‘They didn’t win, that’s the main thing. By now I’m fairly sure they’ll have realised as much, which is why I don’t really give a shit if they’re listening in to this transmission. Are you hearing this, Holroyd, Truro?’ Sunday raised a screw-you finger. ‘We duped them – left them holding a decoy, while I got out with the real thing. I spoke to . . . a recording of Eunice. She told me that one of us needed to get to the Winter Palace.’ Sunday smiled again. ‘By which time you were already on your way. I wish I could have warned you what to expect, but there just wasn’t a means to get through to you in time. But I still don’t know what you
’re going to find in Lionheart. Eunice told me stuff . . . asked me questions. Decided I measured up, I think. But she still didn’t give me any final answers. I’m hoping that’s where you’re going to come in. I wish I could be with you, all the way out there. But you’ve got Jumai and Hector, and that has to be better than nothing. There’s something else, too. You’re out of aug reach, so you can’t access the construct in the usual way. But I had a better idea. I’ve uplinked a copy of her – you should find a memory file sitting in your shipboard inbox. Bandwidth was limited, so I had to strip her down a little – but the important stuff should still be there. You can do what you like with it, but if you think there’s even a chance that Eunice’s advice might come in useful, assign the memory file to a proxy. Bound to be one aboard somewhere.’
Sunday paused for breath. ‘Reply, and I’ll get it in five hours. In ten, you’ll hear back from me again. The household is standing by, Geoffrey – all of us. I’m here, and the elephants are fine. And we want you all back in one piece, as quickly as possible. Take care, brother.’
‘I will,’ Geoffrey said.
‘I’m glad she made it back,’ Hector said. ‘Although it doesn’t sound as if she gained anything by going to Mars.’
That had been Geoffrey’s thought as well, but he decided not to draw any conclusions for the moment. Sunday might have given the impression that she was speaking openly, but that didn’t mean she’d told them everything.
‘You haven’t asked me about the construct.’
‘I assumed that was between you and your sister,’ Hector replied.
Geoffrey watched another ice package shoot away from the iceteroid, right on time, like clockwork.
‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘Do you trust Sunday?’
‘We’ve had our differences.’
‘I mean here, now. With everything that’s happened to us, and what we now know.’
‘I suppose,’ Hector said.
‘She created a simulation of Eunice, a construct. It doesn’t know anything that isn’t in our archives, anything that wasn’t caught by the posterity engines – and if there’s something the real Eunice didn’t want the rest of the world to know, the construct won’t know it either.’