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.
‘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.
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