Blue Remembered Earth

tatters. He had done a shameful thing, then fled the scene of the crime. He had refused to submit to Mech authority, and now he was surrendering himself to people he barely knew, let alone trusted.

It wasn’t too late. The Administration vehicles were still loitering. He could still take his chances with the ocean, let them swoop him into their custody. For a moment, caught between branching possibilities, two versions of his life peeling away from each other like aircraft contrails, he was paralysed.

‘We’re waiting, Mister Akinya,’ Mira Gilbert said.

‘You don’t need to be a part of this,’ he told Jumai. ‘You could still—’

‘Fuck that,’ she said, shooting a dismissive glance at the hovering machines. ‘Sooner take my chances with the aquatics, if that’s all right with you. If you’re smart, you’ll do the same.’

She was right, of course. He’d committed to this path from the moment he tried flying the airpod. No point in second-guessing himself now.

So they went inside, and the Administration vehicles were still loitering when the submarine filled its tanks and slipped under the waves. The craft turned out to be the Alexander Nevsky, one of Tiamaat’s small fleet of subsurface freighters. The Nevsky’s function was to carry or haul cargoes that were too heavy, bulky or hazardous for the elegant, hyper-efficient wind-driven cyberclippers that now moved nine-tenths of the world’s global freight.

The Nevsky was a good hundred and fifty years old, rehabilitated from some dark former career as a nuclear-deterrent vessel. Now the only atomic technology aboard was its engine. Missile bays had been gutted of their terrible secrets and turned into storage holds. Behind it came a ponderous string of cargo drogues, hulled with sharkskin polymer to minimise drag, each as large as the submarine itself.

The Nevsky demanded little in the way of a crew, judging by the exceedingly sparse onboard provisions for cabin space. In fact, it probably ran most of its duties entirely unmanned, save for any passengers who might be along for the ride.

‘How did you get here so quickly?’ Geoffrey asked Mira Gilbert when they were under way again, and after he had asked for the twentieth reassurance that the Cessna was being taken care of.

‘The Nevsky was already operating in the area,’ the merwoman said. ‘Routine cargo run. I podded aboard when it looked likely we’d be able to make a rendezvous.’

Geoffrey and Jumai had been given dry clothes, towels and brimful mugs of salty sea-green chai. They were underwater now, travelling at maximum subsurface cruise speed, but there was no way to tell that from inside the Nevsky. No aug reach, no means of opening a window through the iron dermis of its hull.

‘I don’t know how much Truro told you,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but I’m in a lot of trouble with the Mechanism. I don’t think they’re going to let me get away with it this easily.’

‘We can hold them off for the time being,’ Gilbert said. ‘Technically, you trespassed on Initiative property, you see.’

‘By ditching my plane?’

Gilbert nodded enthusiastically. ‘Over our submarine.’

‘I didn’t know it was there,’ Geoffrey said in benign exasperation. ‘How can that possibly count as trespass?’

‘It’s all for the best. You’re in our immediate jurisdiction now, which means we can activate various quasi-legal stalling measures.’

Geoffrey shivered. It was cold inside the Nevsky, even with the warm clothes they’d been given. ‘Won’t that get you into a stand-off with the Mechanism?’

‘You came to us, not the other way around,’ Gilbert said. ‘That changes the landscape. There are now . . . procedures which can be brought into play.’

‘Such as?’ Jumai asked.

‘If Geoffrey applies for Tiamaat citizenship, the Mech has to wait until we’ve completed our own battery of psych assessments . . . which, within reason, could take just about as long as we like.’

‘And then what – you hand me back anyway?’

‘We’ll cross that bridge later. For now, let’s get started on the citizenship application.’ She smiled at his hesitation. ‘It’s just a formality. You’re not signing over your immortal soul to Neptune and his watery minions.’

‘What do I have to do?’

She voked text into the air. ‘Just read these words, and we’re good to go.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

During the night they had crossed and recrossed the complex fault-and-rift system of the Valles Marineris many times. As they swooped over impossibly high and narrow bridges – barely wide enough for the train’s single gleaming monorail, which gave the disconcerting illusion that they were flying over these immense gaps – Sunday had looked out for evidence of the buildings she had seen from Holroyd’s room, set into the canyon’s walls. A window, a nurse, a green-thorned man in a surgical bath. But she’d seen no sign of human habitation at all, not a single light or pipeline or road in all the empty hours. Valles Marineris was wide enough to span Africa from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian: you could lose entire countries in that kind of area, let alone buildings and windows.

She reminded herself of that over and over, but her brain simply wasn’t wired to grasp scenery on Martian scales.

She hadn’t been able to sleep, not after the news from Earth. Geoffrey had called back and the update was no better than she’d been expecting, which was that Memphis had been dead for so long that there was no hope of recovery. She had no reason to doubt the truth of that. The one thing the family wouldn’t skimp on was medical expertise, and the doctors in Mombasa were as good as anywhere.

So Memphis was gone: an entire thread ripped out of her life without warning, a golden strand unravelling right back to her childhood. She couldn’t deal with that, not right now. She did not need consolation because she did not yet feel anything that she recognised as grief. Instead there was a peculiar vacuum-like absence of other emotions.