Blue Remembered Earth

edge of his goggles. ‘Had enough Earthside politics exported up here to last six fucking lifetimes.’

‘Thanks for sharing. You’re being paid handsomely for this little job, aren’t you?’

He shrugged at Sunday’s question. ‘No complaints, sweet cheeks.’

‘Then please shut the fuck up until I ask you a direct question. I’ve just lost someone very precious to me and the last thing I need is a dose of small-minded Martian nationalism.’ She took a breath. ‘And if you call me “sweet cheeks” one more time, I’ll personally rip those goggles off and ram them down your windpipe.’

Gribelin grinned, took another draw on his cigarette and leaned over to say in Jitendra’s ear: ‘I’m liking her more by the minute. She always this way?’

CHAPTER TWENTY- THREE

Whatever the Nevsky had just docked with – there’d been a dull metallic clunk as it engaged with something – Geoffrey knew it could not be the aqualogy. They hadn’t come far enough. Yet communicated in that clunk had been an impression of immense, dull solidity. A station, perhaps, rooted to the seabed, or a much larger ocean-going vessel.

Merpeople led them down damp black corridors of armoured metal with flume tubes stapled to the ceiling and water-filled channels sunk into the floor. Through doorways Geoffrey saw more merpeople, lubber technicians and robots toiling under bright lights, surrounded by pallets stacked with elaborately decaled cargo pods. A striding exo-clad merwoman was actually checking something off on a clipboard using a glowing-tipped stylus.

Shortly after he grasped that they’d arrived in the launching facility for one of Tiamaat’s surface-to-orbit lifters, they showed him the rocket itself.

Blunt-nosed and pale green, it sat in its silo like a cartridge in a chamber. Loading belts poked through the walls, thrusting across open air to reach into the lifter’s cargo bays. The lower part of the three-hundred-metre-tall rocket was already submerged. Even as Geoffrey watched, the tide rose perceptibly, lapping over the aerodynamic bulge of its engine fairings. They were flooding the chamber in readiness for launch.

‘Basically just a big bottle of fizzy water,’ Mira Gilbert said as they viewed the rocket from one of the silo’s observation windows. ‘Given a good shake, waiting for someone to pop the cork.’

The rocket’s fuel was metallic hydrogen. Geoffrey knew just enough about MH to be suitably unnerved being this close to so much of the stuff. Nothing exotic or rare about MH: it was out there in bulk quantities, found naturally in the solar system, absolutely free for the taking. The snag was that it only existed at the bottom of the atmospheres of gas-giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, where it had been formed by the brutal crush of all that overlaying gas. Under barely comprehensible pressures of many dozens of gigapascals, normal hydrogen underwent a phase transition to an ultradense electrically conductive state. The key to MH was its metastability: after the pressure was withdrawn, it didn’t immediately revert to normal hydrogen. That didn’t mean it was safe, by any definition, just that it was stable enough to be transported and utilised as an energy-dense rocket propellant with a potential specific impulse far beyond anything achievable through purely chemical reactions.

They weren’t mining it yet. Akinya Space had a share in the programme established to develop MH extraction technology, literally lowering a piezoelectrically stabilised bucket into Jupiter’s atmosphere on a spiderfibre cable and ladling out the stuff, and there’d been some promising feasibility demonstrations, but doing that on a cost- effective, repeatable scale made space-elevator technology look like the work of Neanderthals. It was decades, maybe even centuries down the line, and a dicey investment given that MH had no clear economic application for deep-space propulsion, only the short-haul business of escaping planetary gravity wells. So for now they manufactured it, at ludicrous expense, in mammoth orbital production platforms, tapping the kinetic energy of incoming spacecraft to drive diamond-anvil pistons that were themselves as large and complex as rocket engines.

‘The tanks aren’t completely full of MH,’ Gilbert said. ‘That would be really terrifying. The MH tank is tiny, just a little bubble right down at the base of the vehicle. Problem with MH is that it burns hotter than the surface of the sun, and we still can’t make pumps or nozzles that can tolerate that kind of heat without melting. So we have to dilute it, to lower the burn temperature to the point where we can just handle the reaction, and for that we use liquid hydrogen.’

‘In other words,’ Jumai said, ‘MH is so scary that it makes normal hydrogen, this horrible flammable substance, this stuff that explodes and kills people, seem like the safe, cuddly option.’

‘It gets better,’ Gilbert said, cheerfully indifferent to the dangers. ‘You’re going up in it, both of you. Lifters are normally cargo-only shots but they are fully human-rated. It’s bumpy, but you don’t need to worry about that: you’ll be sedated for the ride.’

‘All that, just to get us to the Winter Palace?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘The launch was scheduled anyway,’ Gilbert said, deflating him slightly. ‘Besides, you’re not the only living, breathing passengers.’ And she nodded down towards one of the conveyor belts, at the torpedo-shaped cargo pod that was being fed into the lifter’s side. It was much larger than any of the other containers they had seen, and it was accompanied by six or seven technicians, mer and lubber, riding alongside like pall-bearers, giving every impression of attending to the pod with particular diligence.

‘What’s inside that?’ Jumai asked.

‘Not what,’ Gilbert corrected gently. ‘Who.’

CHAPTER TWENTY- FOUR

The ground refused to stop rising. Ever since leaving Vishniac they had been driving into the cold afternoon of an early spring day on Mars, ascending, always ascending. They were high up on the Tharsis plateau now, nine kilometres above the mean surface level of the rest of the planet, traversing a vast continent-sized lava bulge higher than Kilimanjaro, higher than Everest, higher than any spot on the surface of the Earth. Even now the terrain forged up towards the cone of Pavonis Mons.

Peacock Mountain. They couldn’t see it yet – the summit was mist-shrouded, and the volcano wouldn’t appear as much more than a gentle bump even in clear visibility.

And this wasn’t even the tallest volcano on Mars.

They’d passed nothing in the way of functioning civilisation. A handful of abandoned vehicles, the descent-stage of a long-abandoned or forgotten rocket, the shrivelled, wind-ripped carcass of a transport dirigible that must have come down decades ago. Once they’d passed near a tiny hamlet, a cluster of pewter-coloured domes with fantails of dust on their leeward sides. Lights were on in the comms towers above the domes, but there was no other indication that anyone lived there. None of these dismal landmarks merited even the briefest of glances from Gribelin. Sunday supposed that he drove this way often enough that the scenery offered little in the way of interest. That had been two hours into the trip. They’d gone a long way since then.

‘Here’s your fence, kids,’ Gribelin said eventually, slowing to guide the truck between a line of transponder