‘We’re still drifting,’ Jumai said after a few moments.
‘It’s coming under control. Switch to vernier thrust. Laterals one and three, dorsals two and five: five-second micro-bursts.’
‘Aerobrake is beginning to realign,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Good. Hold this drift for another ten seconds. Stand ready on laterals two and five, two-second bursts. That should kill it.’
When the ship was at rest, holding station relative to Lionheart, Hector said, ‘The remaining centrifuge arm is static and locked down. I don’t think we lost much air – the internal doors must have shut tight as soon as the centrifuge broke away.’
‘Do you think we should pull back to ten kilometres?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘We were fine until we tried moving closer.’
Hector was already unbuckling from his seat. ‘Maybe we were, but if we do that we’re just back to square one – drifting with no fuel to get home. As far as I can see, there’s only one course of action now.’ He pushed himself from the seat, spinning around in the air. ‘I’m going to reach that airlock, disarm the security system.’
‘Across seven kilometres of open space?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘Better than ten.’ Hector stabilised himself, brushing fingertips against the wall, and opened the door.
The ship shook again. The impact was much louder this time, and it triggered an avalanche of damage and warning indications. The after-vibrations rumbled like a passing express train, dying away over tens of seconds. ‘Direct hit against the aerobrake,’ Jumai said, when the diagnostic messages had localised the impact point.
‘Even if we started pulling back now, it wouldn’t make any difference,’ Eunice said.
Geoffrey and Jumai abandoned their seats. ‘There has to be an alternative,’ Geoffrey said. ‘If we give ourselves enough drift away from Lionheart, we’re bound to fall out of range eventually.’
Hector was about to lower his helmet into place. ‘Not how it works out here, cousin. Provided Lionheart can see us, it can hit us.’
‘He’s right,’ Eunice said. ‘Unless you can find another comet to hide behind, you have very little choice. The aerobrake won’t hold indefinitely.’
Jumai and Hector were both now fully suited, with helmets on, although Jumai had not yet locked her visor down. Hector was on suit air: an image of his face, distorted and enlarged, had appeared on the external surface of his visor. He’d become a cartoon character of himself.
‘Senseless the three of us crossing at the same time,’ Hector said. ‘Jumai knows more about security countermeasures than either of us, but if she runs into a gene-locked system she won’t be able to disarm it. Besides, it’s not her mess. That leaves you and me, cousin.’
‘Fine,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We’ll cross together.’
‘Better if I cross alone, then you bring the ship in when I give the all-clear.’
There was another impact, just as brutal as the last.
‘At this rate, there won’t be a ship left to bring in,’ Geoffrey said.
Hector opened his mouth as if to argue, then closed it and nodded once. ‘Follow me and I’ll show you how the manoeuvring units work. Eunice, stick by us. You might come in useful yet.’
Geoffrey should have anticipated a complication, but it wasn’t until they had the thruster packs clipped on that he began to grasp what the difficulty might be. It wasn’t with the packs themselves: as soon as he studied the controls, nestling under his arms like seat rests, Geoffrey understood what Hector had meant when he said that the operation was intuitive.
But they were bulky. At a push, two suited people could have squeezed into the ship’s midsection airlock. With the thruster packs in place, the lock could only take one person at a time.
‘We’ll still go over together,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Cycle through and wait on the other side until I get there. We’ll start our crossing after the next package arrives.’
Hector’s cartoon face nodded. ‘That’s a good idea. At least we’ll have ninety seconds of clear time. If we can get close enough to Lionheart, she may not be able to steer one of those packages onto us.’ He reached out a gloved hand and tapped the airlock control. ‘See you on the other side, cousin.’
The ship jolted. Hector propelled himself into the airlock and closed the inner door. The indicator next to the door flicked to red, signifying that decompression was in progress. ‘Ninety seconds,’ Geoffrey said on the pre-assigned suit-to-suit channel. ‘That one felt pretty bad.’
The inner door twitched in its frame, jamming tight into its pressure seals.
‘He just blew the outer door,’ Jumai said, astonished. ‘Didn’t wait for the chamber to depressurise!’
‘Hector, what are you doing? You’ve just dumped a roomful of air!’
‘We won’t miss it, and it was a damn sight quicker than waiting for the normal cycle,’ Hector said, sounding pathologically calm under the circumstances. ‘But don’t worry. The outer door’s closing normally, and it will still hold air. In a minute or so standard pressure should be restored.’
‘He’s leaving,’ Jumai said. She had her open visor pressed up against the inspection porthole next to the airlock.
‘Hector! We had an agreement!’
‘Senseless both of us taking this risk, Geoffrey. You put your neck on the line when you came aboard this ship to find me. It’s only fair that I reciprocate.’
Jumai worked the lock, forcing it to cycle back to readiness. ‘Going to take a while. You can dump air a lot faster than you can pump it back in, and the inner door won’t open until there’s atmospheric pressure on the other side. Maybe if I had an hour I could find a workaround, but—’
‘Never mind.’
Forcing himself to concentrate, Geoffrey stared at the thruster-pack controls again. They’d looked simple at first glance, but that had been with the understanding that Hector was going to show him the ropes once they were both outside.
‘I have to follow him,’ he said. ‘If I don’t, I’ll never be able to look myself in the face again. But you stay here. We need one warm body back on this ship. The proxy doesn’t count.’
The ship jolted again.
The airlock indicator flicked to green, signifying readiness. Other than the venting of some air to space, no damage had been done by Hector’s sudden depressurisation. Geoffrey forced himself to breathe slower, though it did nothing to calm his racing heart. He was terrified. He didn’t want to go out there, into open space. He’d never been outside a spacecraft in his life, much less in a situation where he might be swatted out of existence at any moment. But he’d told Jumai the truth. He had to be able to live with himself, and if he left Hector to his fate, that abandonment would corrode him from within.
The airlock opened. Geoffrey pushed himself inside, clunking against the outer wall with excess momentum. He nodded at Jumai’s cartoon face, and then the inner door was closing.
The emergency vent control, the one that Hector must already have tripped, could not have been more obvious. It was a red handle the size of a shovel’s grip, recessed into the wall so that it couldn’t be activated unintentionally. Geoffrey took a good hold on it. There was another static handle next to it, providing a bracing point against the sudden decompression. He clenched that with his other fist.
‘Venting,’ he said.
He felt the tug as the air gasped from the lock but retained his grip. His head-up informed him that he was now exposed to hard vacuum. Geoffrey eased out of the lock, taking care not to knock the thruster pack as he emerged. His instincts were to retain a point of contact with the ship, but that wouldn’t get him anywhere. He had to submit himself to space, and trust in the harness.
He pushed away.
‘I’m free,’ he reported.
‘Can you see Hector? He’s out of my sightline.’
‘Must be on the other side of the aerobrake.’ Geoffrey positioned his hands over the matched thruster controls and applied a burp of thrust. ‘Hector,
can you hear me?’
‘Still with you, Geoffrey. I gather you’re outside the ship.’
‘You knew I’d follow.’
Hector let out a sniff of amusement. ‘I suppose I’d have done the same thing. Doesn’t excuse either of us, though.’
The thrust had steered Geoffrey away from the hull. He looked back, seeing the ship in its entirety for the first time. The aerobrake was a braced circle blotting out a significant fraction of the sky, slightly dished on the surface he was looking at, aerodynamically convex on the other. Even with his eyes amped, there were details he couldn’t make out. The shadows were black, the lit surfaces gloomy.
He would have to edge out from the cover of the aerobrake if he was to follow Hector.
White light rimmed the circular shield, turning it into an eclipsed sun with its own corona. The light faded. He’d felt nothing, heard nothing, but he knew that another package had just hit the aerobrake.
‘Hector?’
‘Still here. How’s Jumai?’
‘I’m fine,’ she replied.
‘Don’t even think about coming after us,’ Hector added.
Geoffrey arrested his lateral drift. He was beginning to emerge from the protective shadow of the aerobrake, with the iceteroid’s launch systems looming into visibility again. Almost immediately, the visor dropped an icon over a tiny point of light. Next to the icon, distance and velocity numerics pointed to an object two kilometres ahead.
‘I see you, Hector.’
‘Good. You’ve made your point, now go back inside.’
Geoffrey stabbed at the arrow-shaped control studs, orientating himself in the same rough trajectory that Hector was already following. He applied a thrust burst, saw the hull of the ship begin to slide by. The aerobrake was looming closer. He studied its approach, hoping he’d given himself enough clearance not to ram against its underside or clip the edge as he passed. The icon put him eighteen hundred metres behind Hector now, but Hector was still pulling ahead. Strobeflashes of blue fire marked his thruster inputs. He was gunning it.
Geoffrey was sliding past the aerobrake now. He’d cut it close – as it neared, it looked as if he’d made a fatal misjudgement – but it whisked past him in absolute silence, and looking back he was at last able to inspect the damage to the ship. It was worse than he’d been expecting. The ice impacts had blasted away the aerobrake’s ablative cladding in metre-thick chunks, exposing an underlying integument of geodesic support elements and shock dampeners. No matter that eighty per cent of the aerobrake was still intact, it was now useless for its intended function.
His suit veered sharply. A fist-sized boulder whipped by in the night. He guessed it was debris from the aerobrake: the suit had detected it and taken evasive action.
‘Jumai,’ he said, ‘stay suited, and make sure you’re clipped into a thruster pack. The ship can’t take much more punishment.’
‘Yeah. I figured that out for myself.’
The timbre of her voice was different, and it took him a moment to understand why. She was on suit air.
He looked back again: just in time to see a tiny figure emerge out of eclipse from behind the aerobrake.
Knowing there was nothing to be done – he could hardly argue with her, when he’d done exactly the same thing – he returned his attention to Hector’s distant form. Twenty-one-hundred metres and receding. He gunned his own thruster pack again, feeling the pressure as it nudged his spine. He held the studs down as long as he dared, watching the relative velocity reach zero and then begin to climb into positive digits. Geoffrey guessed that he’d traversed a kilometre himself, about the length of the ship, since clearing the aerobrake. Hector must be nearing the halfway mark, and he was still out there, still alive.
Blue fire streaked past: superheated steam from an ice package, stabbing out from Lionheart like a chameleon’s tongue. The entire cosmos pulsed white. He looked back, saw the aerobrake glowing against the dim grey nimbus of the inner solar system. The glow faded, darkening to red, then black. There was more damage.
‘Jumai?’
‘Still here. Am I the only one who’s starting to worry about what we do without a ship to get us home?’
‘We can manage without the aerobrake, provided we can top up the tanks with whatever fuel that engine uses,’ Hector said. ‘All I have to do is persuade Lionheart that we’re its new best friends. Doesn’t sound too difficult, does it?’
‘When you put it like that . . .’ Geoffrey said.
‘I’m about two kilometres out. I can see the lock from here. If the protocols are standard, I shouldn’t have any difficulties working the outer door. I’m a little off-beam, so I need—’
Something white flashed ahead.
Geoffrey’s first thought was that Hector had started correcting his angle of approach, or had even begun to reduce his speed in readiness for landing by the airlock.
That wasn’t it.
‘Hector?’ he asked, dreading what his senses were telling him: that the flash had been much too bright to have been anything so innocent as a course correction.
Hector wasn’t answering.
On the area of Geoffrey’s visor reserved for comms status, a red warning symbol began to pulse.
‘Hector!’ he shouted.
But he knew the truth. He didn’t need the helmet to tell him that. Hector wasn’t responding because Hector wasn’t there any more.
‘He’s gone,’ Jumai said. ‘Isn’t he?’
The two of them were still falling towards Lionheart, towards the point or surface in space where Hector had been intercepted and neutralised.
There wasn’t time for shock or grief, or even terror, over and above the fear that Geoffrey was already experiencing. Just the immediate and pressing calculus of survival. At his present rate of fall, Geoffrey would be passing Hector’s place of execution in only a dozen or more seconds.
‘Do nothing,’ he told Jumai. ‘No course adjustment, no speed adjustment, nothing. Not until we’re almost there.’
‘What happened?’
‘Hector must have directed a burst of thrust towards Lionheart. I don’t think it saw him until then. I don’t think it noticed him. He was just too small a target compared to the ship, and with all the debris floating around from the aerobrake—’
‘You hope.’
‘If I’m wrong, we’ll know it very shortly.’
He supposed that, of the myriad modes of death one might contemplate, being annihilated by a chunk of catapulted ice shot across space so quickly that it arrived without warning, was not the worst way to go. It would be painless. There would be no pain because once that ice touched him – once its kinetic energy began to convert into heat and mechanical forces – there would be no him to experience sensations of any kind whatsoever. He would no longer be an organism. He would be a pink nebula of rapidly expanding and cooling steam with some mixed-in impurities.
But he must have been right about Hector, because Lionheart refrained from killing him. He waited until the dull red world felt only a breath away, a hand’s reach. He didn’t dare begin to slow down until then. Although he knew that the suit had the ability to detect and avoid collisions autonomously, he wasn’t trusting it to arrest his forward motion. Closing his eyes – he did not want to see the ground coming up if it was clear he wasn’t going to stop – he jammed his thumbs onto the reverse-thrust studs. A few seconds passed before it occurred to him that if he didn’t monitor his progress, he might push himself back out into space again.
More by luck than judgement, he found himself settling gently down – or was it sideways? There was still no appreciable gravity – onto Lionheart. There was red ground below him, grey bunkerlike surface installations all around, veined with pipes and gridded with radiators. The tallest structure was a buttressed tower with docking clamps arranged around its top, wide open like a grasping hand. That was where the ship would have berthed, if their approach had been orthodox. The airlock had to be nearby.
>
His feet touched down, crunching into the surface as if he was breaking through the crust of a cake, into the soggy interior. That was just momentum, not his own weight.
‘I see you,’ Jumai said.
She came down like a strobing angel, and at first he feared that she’d initiated slowdown too high up; that she might yet attract Lionheart’s attention the way Hector had. But her judgement was no worse than his own. She landed a few metres away, and for a moment it was all they could do to stare at their own stupefied cartoon faces.
‘I’m sorry about—’ Jumai started saying.
‘Later,’ Geoffrey said, startled by his own callousness, but knowing that was how it had to be, until they were safe.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
They found an airlock easily enough, set at ground level. Geoffrey didn’t doubt that there was another one situated near the docking clamps, for the convenience of arriving ships. Jumai slapped her palm against the green-lit entry panel and the outer door opened without complaint. The iceteroid’s defences, geared towards the interception of arriving ships, paid no heed to anything happening on the surface.
There was room enough for both of them inside the lock, even with their thruster packs. The outer door closed; air gushed in through slats.
‘We’ve lost contact with the ship,’ Jumai said. ‘Eunice was right – the airlock’s blocking signals.’
When pressure normalised, Geoffrey took off his helmet and allowed it to drift down to the floor.
‘Eidetic scanner,’ Jumai said, directing his attention to a hooplike device set just below the ceiling. ‘And a gene reader, in that wall panel under the scanner. You’ll need to make skin contact with it.’
Geoffrey ordered the suit to remove itself. He stepped out, wearing just his inner layer, shivering as the coldness of the air touched him for the first time. He positioned himself under the eidetic scanner, remembering the similar device in Chama and Gleb’s menagerie. The scanner lowered down until it formed a halo around his head. The device would be primed to respond to visual memories of specific events or locations; it would easily be capable of distinguishing between memories laid down directly and those confabulated from second-hand experience. At the same time he pressed his bare palm against the grey rectangle of the gene reader. He felt the tingle as the reader drew a representative sample of skin cells.