Blue Remembered Earth (68 page)

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.

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.’