Blue Remembered Earth

suit? In all that time?’

‘We’d have known. There was never a point when someone, somewhere, wasn’t watching the Winter Palace. Ships came and went occasionally – automated supply vehicles, Memphis on one of his errands – but no one else ever came out. Her star may have faded, but even in her last years she was still enough of a celebrity for that to have made the news, if it had happened.’

‘But to live inside that thing – after all she’d done, all she’d seen. How could she do that to herself?’

‘By going a little mad,’ Geoffrey said.

‘She could ching, I suppose. But that wouldn’t have been enough consolation for me.’

‘You’re not my grandmother. Whatever she needed, it was in there.’

‘That’s not living.’

‘Never said it was,’ Geoffrey replied.

After a silence Jumai went on, ‘Well, we dock first. That’s clear. Then we see how easy it is to break inside. Figure you expect some complications, or you wouldn’t have brought me along.’

‘If you don’t have to lift a finger, you’ll still get paid,’ he reassured her.

‘You still think I’m a mercenary to the core.’

‘I think you like risk. Not quite the same thing.’

‘In your book.’ Jumai gave an unconcerned shrug, her nausea blasted away for the time being. ‘So: let’s see what our docking options are.’ And she reached out and tumbled the image of the Winter Palace like a toy suspended over a cot until she’d brought one of the endcaps into view. She plucked her fingers to zoom in, frowning at the details. ‘See anything out of the ordinary? You’re the seasoned space traveller, not me.’

‘Can’t say I’m any kind of expert on docking systems.’

‘You don’t need to be,’ said a voice behind them. It was Mira Gilbert, weightless now, fully divested of her mobility harness but equally at home in zero gravity as she was under water. She wore a skintight zip-up orange and grey outfit fitted with pockets and grab-patches. ‘We’ve assessed the situation. Perfectly standard interfaces and capture clamps: the Quaynor will be able to hard-dock without difficulty.’

‘You came just to tell us that?’ Geoffrey asked. He’d barely seen Gilbert since his revival.

‘Actually, I came to tell you that there’s been a development back in the East African Federation. Public eyes detected the activation of the Kilimanjaro ballistic launcher.’

‘Fuck,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Not sure what came up: could be a test package, a cargo pod, or something else. Right now we’re leaning towards “something else”. Whatever it was got pushed all the way to orbit, where it was met by another vehicle.’

‘What kind?’ Jumai asked.

‘The Kinyeti, an asteroid miner registered to Akinya Space,’ Gilbert answered slowly, so the words had time to hit home. ‘Something with at least the range and capabilities of the Quaynor, if not greater.’

She pulled up an image: either a long-range real-time grab or an archival picture of the same ship. As far as Geoffrey was concerned, he could have been looking at another view of the ship he was travelling in. The Kinyeti had the same skeletal outline, built for operations in vacuum with no requirement to withstand atmosphere or hard acceleration/deceleration. It had engines and fuel tanks at one end, docking and mining equipment at the other, and a pair of contra-rotating centrifuge arms mounted at the midsection bulge of her main crew quarters, with habitat modules on the end of each arm.

He’d seen the Quaynor’s arms from inside the ship. They were static, welded into immobility, their only remaining function to serve as outriggers for comms gear and precision manoeuvring systems.

‘Been on high-burn ever since it met the blowpipe package,’ Gilbert went on. ‘Keeps that up, it’ll reach the Winter Palace about ninety minutes ahead of us.’

‘Has to be one or both of the cousins,’ Geoffrey said.

‘This caught us with our flippers off,’ Gilbert said. ‘We didn’t think the blowpipe was working yet.’

‘It wasn’t,’ Geoffrey told her. ‘Not properly. They tested it when my grandmother was scattered, but it wasn’t ready for people . . . not by a long margin. Only Lucas or Hector would be fucking mad enough to risk their necks riding the blowpipe.’

‘They want to catch up with us, they wouldn’t have had much choice,’ Gilbert said. ‘Libreville would have taken too long to get to, and they didn’t have access to their own rocket. Would’ve been blowpipe or nothing.’

‘Someone means business,’ Jumai said. ‘But we knew that already. OK, what does this change?’

‘Nothing,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘We’re not turning around. Can we squeeze some more speed out of this thing, Mira? Now that we no longer need to hide our intentions?’

‘Depends how fast you want to go,’ the merwoman said. ‘And how many space-traffic violations you want to stack up.’

‘Enough to make sure the cousins don’t get there ahead of us. All we need to do is shut them out – shouldn’t be too hard, should it? We get in, find out what, if anything, Eunice left behind up there, and leave. And then, if at all possible, we can all get on with our lives.’

‘This is your life now,’ Gilbert reminded him gently. ‘Citizen Akinya.’

Geoffrey touched the damp, warm glass of Arethusa’s container, trying to make out the form it held. With the way the hold’s lights were arranged, he could discern little more than a dark hovering shadow in the green-stained murkiness of the water tank.