Hector sighed. ‘All the files cross-matched. Nothing had been erased or lost. This ship only ever made one trip. It was built in deep space, and it came back to Lunar orbit, where it’s been ever since. Box-fresh.’
‘What do you mean, built in deep space?’
‘Unless the files are lying . . . this ship was manufactured on one of our Kuiper belt assets. A dormant comet, orbiting beyond Neptune.’
‘You make igloos out of ice, Hector, not ships. I know that much.’
‘I realise this is painful for you, Geoffrey, getting up to speed with what your own family has been doing for the last hundred years. Of course you can’t make anything out of ice and dirt: that’s not why we went to the Kuiper belt, nor why we spent a fortune planting flags all over anything bigger than a potato. We mine those iceteroids for what they can give us: water, volatiles, hydrocarbons. We send robots and raw materials out there and they build mining and on-site refining facilities, and then they package the processed material and catapult it back to us on energy-efficient trajectories. The robots and raw materials come from our facilities on the main belt M-class asteroids, where the metals are. It’s a supply chain. Can you grasp that?’
‘You still haven’t told me how a ship could originate on a comet.’
‘There are metals and assembly facilities in the Kuiper belt. We put them there, to mine the volatiles. Thousands of tonnes of complex self-repairing machinery, serviced by Plexus machines – even more tonnage. And that infrastructure was already in place by 2100, already earning back our investment.’
‘You’re saying it could have been reassigned to make a ship?’
‘Saying it’s possible, that’s all. Maybe illegal – there’d have been any number of patent violations, unless our subcontractors were somehow in the know – but it could have been done. If Eunice wanted to build a copy of her ship, she had the means. All she would have needed were raw materials and time.’
Geoffrey closed his eyes. It wasn’t just the steadily mounting gee-load, although that was a part of it. He needed to think. If they were on VASIMR propulsion now, the power plant was surely being pushed to its limit. He remembered how leisurely the departure of Sunday’s swiftship had appeared.
‘And secrecy,’ he said.
‘She had it. The Kuiper belt’s a long way out, and it’s not like anyone else was living anywhere near that asset.’
‘Want to hazard a guess as to where we’re headed?’
Hector looked at the trajectory display, but it was clear that he’d already digested the salient details. ‘If that’s to be believed, then we’re going a long way out.’
‘Maybe back to the ship’s point of origin?’
‘If I could get out of these restraints, maybe I could query the ship.’
Geoffrey struggled against his own cuffs, but they were still holding him tight. ‘We’re safe now, though,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘The ship clearly wanted to make sure one or both of us was family, so it had to test our blood. It may also have wanted to cushion us during the escape phase. But that’s over – so why would it insist on holding us here now?’
‘Is that a rhetorical question, cousin?’
‘Release me,’ Geoffrey said.
The cuffs relinquished their hold, as did the ankle restraints. He was still buckled into the seat, and while the ship was under acceleration it might make sense to stay that way, but he was no longer a prisoner of the chair.
‘You just had to ask nicely.’
Hector clenched his fists again, made one final attempt to break the restraints by force, then said, ‘Release me.’
The ship let him go. Hector stretched his arms, holding them out from his body against the acceleration. Geoffrey remembered that his cousin had been confined to the chair for a lot longer than he had, and had spent much of that interval expecting to die. For the first time in a very long while he felt a dim flicker of empathy.
They were blood, after all.
‘I guess the next thing is to tell it to stop and let us off.’
Hector strained forward. ‘This is Hector Akinya. Acknowledge command authority.’
‘Welcome, Hector Akinya,’ the ship said, speaking in what Geoffrey recognised as the voice of Memphis, or one very close to it. ‘Welcome, Geoffrey Akinya.’
‘Stop engines,’ Hector said, in the tones of one who was used to getting his way. ‘Immediately. Return us to Lunar orbit.’
‘Propulsion and navigation control are currently suspended, Hector.’
Geoffrey issued the same command, was met by the same polite but firm rebuttal. It was irksome to have Memphis speaking back, as if the ship failed to grasp that mimicking the voice of a recently dead man was an act of grave tactlessness.
‘How long?’ he asked. Then, sensing that the ship might need clarification: ‘For how long are propulsion and navigation control suspended?’
‘For the duration of the trip, Geoffrey.’
Hector looked at him, evidently sharing his profound unease at that answer. ‘State our destination, and the duration of the trip,’ he said.
‘Our destination is KBO 2071 NK subscript 789,’ the ship said. ‘Akinya Space Trans-Neptunian asset 116 stroke 133, codename Lionheart. Trip time will be fifty-two days.’
Hector listened to that and shook his head.
‘What?’ Geoffrey asked, growing impatient. ‘Is that the same place or not?’
‘It’s the same iceteroid where the ship was built. I remember the name, Lionheart. But that’s Trans-Neptunian, for pity’s sake. I’ve been as far out as Saturn, cousin. I know how long it takes, and fifty-two days won’t begin to cut it.’
Geoffrey could only nod. He knew how long it had taken the swiftship to get Sunday to Mars, and Mars was a hop and a skip away compared to Neptune’s orbit. ‘Eunice’s mission to the edge of the system took a lot longer than a hundred days, even allowing for the return time.’
‘More than a year. So either the ship is bullshitting us, for no reason at all, or . . .’ Hector didn’t seem to know where to go with that.
‘Or we’re on a very fast ship.’
‘Nothing’s that fast.’
‘Until now,’ Geoffrey said.
Behind them, the command deck doors opened. Geoffrey twisted around in his harness, straining to see past the bulk of his seat. His heart skipped at the sight of a proxy, looming in the doorway. It was one of the shipboard units he’d seen earlier – a man-shaped chassis constructed from tubes and joints.
It was cradling a body, and he recognised it.
‘This female has suffered minor concussion, but is otherwise uninjured.’ The proxy spoke with the voice of the ship. ‘Shall I convey her to the medical suite?’
Geoffrey unbuckled his harness. They were still accelerating, but the thrust appeared to have levelled out at around one gee. He could move around in that without difficulty, provided he took care. ‘Do so,’ he said.
‘I thought you said you were alone.’
‘I thought I was.’
Hector was in the process of undoing his own restraints when a ching request arrived. Geoffrey voked acknowledgement and placed Mira Gilbert’s head and upper torso in the middle of the command deck. He voked Hector in on the conversation.
‘Unless someone’s spoofing the return signal, you’re alive,’ Gilbert’s figment said. ‘We’ve been trying to establish contact since . . . well, whatever it was that happened. We’ll get to that in a moment. Are you all right?’
Geoffrey took a moment to decide how to answer that question truthfully. ‘I’m fine . . . for the time being. Beyond that, things become a little murky. I’m with Hector – he’s OK as well. Since you seem to be alive, I presume Jumai got word through?’
‘Jumai reached the point where she was able to signal us. She told us to undock immediately and execute a safe-distancing manoeuvre. I told her I’d wait until she was in the lock, but she insisted on going back inside.’
‘I know. We just f
ound her.’
‘How is she?’
‘I’m guessing she made it onto the ship just before we departed. She must have been knocked around a bit, but the proxy tells me there isn’t anything seriously wrong with her.’
Gilbert’s figment nodded. ‘OK – next question. The habitat’s gone. Presumably you worked that much out for yourselves. How much control do you have over Winter Queen?’
‘None whatsoever, and by the way, this isn’t Winter Queen. It’s some other ship Eunice sent back in its place. Similar, but not the same. And there’s no sign that Eunice was ever here, either aboard this ship or anywhere in the Winter Palace.’
Hector shot him a warning look. ‘Any other family business you want to reveal, cousin?’
‘They already know more than you’d approve of – a little more won’t hurt.’
‘How can she not have been in the habitat?’ Gilbert asked. ‘Jumai said something similar, but we didn’t have time to get the full story out of her before she went off-air again.’
‘I don’t know,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘Obviously none of us ever dealt with Eunice except via ching . . . other than our housekeeper Memphis.’
‘All right. As important as that is, there are actually more pressing matters right now. You say you can’t control the ship – what have you tried?’
‘Everything,’ Hector said. ‘Flight plan’s locked in, and it won’t let us change anything.’
‘We’re tracking you, but we don’t have a handle on your trajectory yet. Where are you headed?’
‘If the ship’s to be believed,’ Geoffrey said, ‘an iceteroid in the Kuiper belt.’
Gilbert looked apologetic. ‘You won’t make it out of Earth–Moon space at this rate. You’re running way outside the safe operating envelope for that type of propulsion system.’
Hector looked sceptical. ‘You’ve figured that much out in just a few minutes?’
‘You’re lighting up near-Lunar space like a Roman candle. You need to find a way to throttle back, and urgently. At the very least, you’re going to burn so much fuel you won’t have a snowball’s hope of slowing down this side of the Oort cloud.’
‘The ship has its own ideas,’ Geoffrey said.
‘You’ll have to do something. You’ve already reached the point where no local traffic has enough delta-vee to catch up with you – and that includes Quaynor, I’m afraid.’
Geoffrey nodded, although a fuller understanding of the situation did not make it any easier to accept. ‘I need to check on Jumai. Maybe she can help us.’
‘We’ll keep reviewing the situation,’ the merwoman said. ‘In the meantime, good luck. I was about to wish you “godspeed”, but under the circumstances . . . maybe not.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Getting to the medical suite had been more difficult than Geoffrey had anticipated. The central corridor had become a plunging vertical shaft, one that could only be ascended or descended using the recessed ladders Geoffrey had noticed on his arrival. He’d wanted to go down alone – he’d tried to persuade Hector to stay on the bridge, monitoring the situation – but his cousin had been determined to accompany him. They had been able to secure themselves to handholds and grabs as they worked their way down, but the process had been time-consuming and fraught with hazard.
There was something troubling about the provision of the ladders, though. Whoever had decided they were necessary must have known that the ship would be accelerating hard. That, and the ship’s confident assessment of their trip time to Lionheart, made it all the more difficult to accept that the engine was malfunctioning.
Geoffrey should have been encouraged by that, but he wasn’t. He didn’t like the idea of being trapped aboard a ship that was already travelling too fast to be intercepted.
‘I don’t remember what happened,’ Jumai said, when the proxy had brought her round to consciousness and the ship had confirmed that her injuries were minor, the concussion having no long-term consequences. ‘I was outside . . . and now I’m not.’
‘You remember Winter Queen?’ he asked.
She considered his question for a moment before answering. ‘In the habitat, yes.’
‘You’re aboard it,’ Geoffrey said, before adding, ‘sort of.’
‘We’re prisoners,’ Hector stated gravely. ‘The ship has locked us out of its controls and we’ve been accelerating since we broke out of the Winter Palace. But it isn’t Eunice’s old ship, and we don’t really know where it’s taking us.’
‘We found your suit,’ Jumai said.
Hector nodded. ‘Geoffrey told me you both came aboard to find me. You were supposed to leave the station and get to safety before the charges blew. You remember the charges?’
She answered his question with one of her own: ‘What happened to them?’
‘I defused them,’ Geoffrey said. ‘But they were the least of our problems, as it turns out. The station was already counting down to its own demolition. It must have been designed this way, all those years ago – made to come apart, so that the ship could break out without damaging itself.’
‘Did you say this isn’t the Winter Queen?’ There was a notch in her brow – a frown, or the crease of a headache, or both.
‘It looks the same,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but it’s younger, and it was built on the edge of the solar system. It’s also . . . doing things. Stuff that ships don’t usually do, in my limited experience.’
‘Your grandmother was a piece of work, do you know that?’
Geoffrey managed a graveyard smile. ‘I’m coming round to that conclusion myself.’
‘The ship is accelerating too strongly,’ Hector said. ‘That’s what the people outside think, anyway. But clearly we’re still alive, and the ship looks as if it’s been designed to cope with this kind of thing.’
‘You think Eunice gave it some tweaks?’
‘If she did, it was a hell of a tune-up,’ Geoffrey said. ‘If the ship isn’t lying, it’s headed for an iceteroid in the Kuiper belt. It’s an Akinya asset, a long way out. Ship says we’ll be there in fifty-two days, which is nothing.’
‘Doesn’t sound like nothing to me. That’s – what – nearly two months?’
‘It should take a lot longer,’ Hector told her. ‘Our best swiftships – the best that anyone can buy, including me – have an upper limit of about two hundred kilometres per second, and most don’t get anywhere near that. We’ll need to be moving about five times faster.’
‘That’s impossible,’ Geoffrey said.
‘One thousand kilometres per second,’ Hector said. ‘Or one-third of one per cent of the speed of light. It may not sound very fast when you put in those terms, and frankly, in the grand scheme, it isn’t. But if the ship keeps this up, the three of us will shortly be moving faster than anyone has ever travelled in the entire history of human civilisation.’
‘Well,’ Jumai said, ‘this sure as fuck wasn’t in my plans when I woke up this morning.’
‘I suspect that goes for the three of us,’ Hector said.
‘You shouldn’t have come after us,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You had a chance to get out.’
‘So did you,’ Hector said. ‘Why criticise Jumai for doing exactly the same thing you did?’
‘I wanted to save the station,’ Geoffrey said. ‘There was never much chance of me getting out in time.’
‘Part of you must have still wanted to give it a try. That’s basic human survival instinct kicking in, cousin. Yet you came back, and stayed with me until the ship’s countdown reached zero.’ Hector glanced away, then forced himself to meet Geoffrey’s eyes. He held the stare, his chin working while he sought the right words. ‘After everything that has happened between us, after what you thought Lucas and I had done to Memphis, I did not expect that.’
‘I had to know what this ship is for,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Maybe you did,’ Jumai said. ‘But you couldn’t leave him, either.’
Softly, Hector said, ‘If Lucas a
nd I have wronged you, it is only because we wanted the best for the family. Would we have involved you if that was not the case?’
‘You opened something you weren’t expecting,’ Geoffrey said.
‘That is true.’
‘Maybe there was a point where we had the option of letting all this stay hidden. But after what we’ve seen now – the Winter Palace, this ship – I don’t think we can go back. Not even if we wanted to.’
‘The destruction of the habitat will have been visible to countless public eyes,’ Hector said. ‘The world will soon know what was inside it – if it doesn’t already.’
‘So you accept that the cat is out of the bag?’
Hector emitted a mirthless half-laugh. ‘What choice do any of us have now?’
Geoffrey turned to Jumai. ‘I can’t say I’m happy that you chose to come back aboard the ship. But at the same time, I’m glad to have you here. Does that make any sense?’
‘Maybe it will when my head clears,’ she said.
When Jumai was strong enough to be moved, they had the proxy convey her back up to the command deck while Geoffrey and Hector took the ladders. They had been under way for more than three hours by this point, and the relentless acceleration had already taken them as far from the Moon as its own orbit around the Earth. In one of the viewing ports, it already looked smaller than it did from Africa. More than anything, it was this that touched Geoffrey on a visceral level.
It wasn’t numbers any more; it was something he could look at with his own eyes and feel, deep in his guts. He didn’t need to take anyone’s word that they were going a long way out.
For most of the last hour Jumai had been sitting in the right-most command chair, attempting to find a way to unlock the ship’s controls. She had been doing none of the command inputting herself since the seat would not recognise her as being of Akinya blood. But that didn’t stop her directing Hector and Geoffrey.
It was to no avail. The control lockout was watertight, and all the usual circumventions proved futile.
‘Not saying it can’t be broken,’ Jumai said, when her last attempt was rebuffed, ‘but it’s going to take someone a lot smarter than me to do it. Plus, they’d need to be on this ship already.’
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