Blue Remembered Earth (77 page)

‘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.

‘State your name,’ a machine-generated voice said, in Swahili.

He swallowed before answering. ‘Geoffrey Akinya.’

‘State your relationship to Eunice Akinya.’

‘I am her grandson. Please cease attack on the approaching ship. It is not hostile. Repeat, it is
not
hostile.’

If the scanner understood his words, or cared about them, it gave no sign. The hoop tracked up and down, ghost symbols fluttering across his vision – weird and senseless hieroglyphs, in colours that the naked eye could not quite perceive: yellow-blues, red-greens. The scanner was pushing deep and intrusive fingers into his skull. It was reading the architecture of his brain the way a blind person might trace the profile of a human face.

‘Visualise the household, Geoffrey Akinya. You are walking through the west wing, away from the garden. It is late afternoon.’

Picking one memory out of the thousands he held felt dangerously arbitrary. He tried to focus on the details, the specific and telling texture of things. The gleam of polished flooring, the squeak of it under his shoes, the white-plastered walls, the way the light fell on the brown-framed cabinets and cases of the private museum. Dust in lazy suspension, pinned in bars of sunlight. The smell from the kitchen, which managed to infiltrate every corner of the household.

‘Go to your room.’

He walked there, rather than simply imagining the transition. He pushed open the door, trying to recall the precise heft of it. He had been in the room recently, at least by his own sense of time, so it was not difficult to bring to mind its dimensions, the simple layout and sparse furnishings.

‘Sit on the bed. Look around.’

He did as he was told, forcing the act of conscious and continuous recollection – not just bringing to mind disconnected objects and impressions, but replaying the visual scene as a smoothly flowing sequence, his point of view tracking fluidly.

‘Focus your attention on the elephants.’

He had called them to mind, but only as one element of the room’s interior. Then he remembered how the Winter Palace had also narrowed its focus onto the elephants, as if they were a key component in the establishing of his identity.

That had merely been a question about his age when he’d received the gift. This was an altogether more intense act of scrutiny. He sensed that to fail in this specific reconstruction would be to fail entirely. Lionheart was holding its breath, as he held his.

He visualised the elephants. He held them in his mind’s eye as six distinct forms, recalling the weight of them, the smoothness of the carved wood in his hands, the sharpness of the tusks against his fingertips, the rough, dark feel of their bases. The elephants were all slightly different, even allowing for their diminishing sizes. He strove to visualise the distinguishing details, the subtle variations of head, ear and trunk postures, the leg positions. He concentrated until the act of sustained recollection was unbearable.

The image collapsed. The room evaporated from recall.

‘Welcome, Geoffrey Akinya,’ the voice said. ‘You have authorisation to proceed.’

The eidetic scanner slid back towards the ceiling. He removed his palm from the gene reader.

‘Cease the attack against the incoming ship,’ he said again, hoping that the system was sophisticated enough to understand and comply. ‘It is not hostile.’

‘Approach defences have been stood down. Do you have further instructions regarding the ship?’

‘Give me back comms.’

Jumai, who still had her helmet on, said, ‘Link re-established. Eunice – do you hear us?’ She waited a few moments, listening to the voice at the other end of the link. ‘Good. The bombardment should have stopped. I think we’ve managed to persuade Lionheart that we’re not a threat, but it’s probably best if we keep the ship out of immediate harm’s way for the moment. If we can work out how to bring you in under automatic guidance, we’ll be in touch.’