Blue Remembered Earth

‘I flew ships like this before you were a glint in your mother’s eye,’ Eunice said. ‘The avionics, the interfaces . . . they’re as ancient and old-fashioned as me.’

‘If she can do this—’ Jumai said.

‘We should use all available assets,’ Arethusa concurred. ‘Mira, if you don’t like what’s happening, you can revoke Geoffrey’s command privilege at any time, can’t you?’

Gilbert gave the merwoman equivalent of a shrug. ‘More or less.’

‘I’ll accept the consequences. Geoffrey – I can’t force you to do this, but you have my consent to fly the Quaynor. If Eunice is able to help with that, so much the better.’

‘You must do this,’ Eunice said. Her tone turned needling. ‘You let elephants into your head, grandson. Surely you can make an exception for me.’

‘Give me the controls,’ he said, popping his knuckles, spreading his fingers, loosening his shoulder muscles, just as if he was readying himself for an hour in the Cessna. ‘Eunice – I’m letting you in. You know I can kick you out at any time, so don’t overstay your welcome.’

‘As if I’d ever do that.’

He voked the rarely given command, the one that assigned full voluntary control of his own body to another intelligence. There was nothing magical about it; it was merely an inversion of the usual ching protocols: nerve impulses running one way rather than the other, sensory flow leaving his head rather than entering it.

Still it was strange for him. People did this sort of thing all the time, hiring out their bodies as warmblood proxies. He’d never had cause to ching into a warmblood himself – but if the situation had demanded it, and there’d been no other choice, he supposed he’d have accepted the arrangement without complaint. But the other way round: to be the warmblood? Never in a million years.

And here he was being driven by his grandmother.

She stole his eyes first. Between one moment and the next, they weren’t looking where he wanted, but where she needed to see – and her intake of visual information was so efficient that it felt as if he had gone into a kind of quivering optic seizure, his eyeballs jerking this way and that in the manner of REM sleep. Then she took his hands. They started moving on the fold-out keypads, rap-tapping commands into the Quaynor’s avionics. It felt, for an instant, as if his hands were stuffed into enchanted gloves that forced his fingers to dance.

Then she stole his voice. It still sounded like him: she could make him speak, but she couldn’t alter the basic properties of his larynx.

‘I have an approach solution. It’s imperfect, and it will still expose us to the Winter Palace’s countermeasures. If we were to attempt to match her spin precisely, we’d break up inside sixty seconds. This is a compromise that gets us to the dock and minimises our likelihood of suffering catastrophic damage. I will assume control all the way in, and make any necessary adjustments as we go. Do I have authorisation?’

‘Do you need it?’ Gilbert asked.

‘I thought it best to ask first, child.’

‘Do it,’ Arethusa said.

The acceleration came without warning, without a cushioning transition from zero-gee. To his horror and wonderment, Geoffrey realised that he could hear the engines, even in vacuum. They had been cranked up so high that something of their output, some phantom of undamped vibration, was propagating through the chassis of the ship, despite all the intervening layers of insulation and shockproofing. It sounded like a landslide or a stampede and it made him very, very nervous. Red lights started flashing, master caution alarms sounding. The Quaynor was registering indignant objection to the punishment it was now enduring.

It had served its human masters well. Why were they putting it through this?

‘She’s holding,’ Eunice announced, through Geoffrey’s throat. ‘But that was the easy bit.’

The Quaynor had to execute a curving trajectory to match, or even come close to matching, the Winter Palace’s spin. In the Cessna, it would have needed nothing more than a modest application of stick and rudder. But curvature was acceleration, and in vacuum that could only be achieved by thrust, directed at an angle to the ship’s momentary vector. The magnetoplasma engines could not be gimballed, and therefore the Quaynor was forced to use auxiliary steering and manoeuvring rockets, pushed to their limits. Under such a load, the possibility of buckling was a very real risk. Geoffrey needed no sensors or master- caution alarms to tell him that. He could feel it in the push of his bones against his restraints, the creaks and groans from his surroundings.

When something clanged against the hull he assumed it was the resumption of the Winter Palace’s attack, but no: it was just a speck of debris from the wreckage of the Kinyeti. More came, in drumming volleys, and then they were through the thickest part of it. The acceleration and steering thrust intensified and abated in savage jerks as Eunice finessed her approach solution. They were very close now, fewer than a dozen kilometres from the station, and the extent of its damage – or lack of it – was becoming much clearer. A fraction, maybe one in five, of the pirate devices appeared unharmed. They wheeled slowly into view and then slowly out of view again, like cabins in a Ferris wheel.

‘Maybe we still have approach authorisation,’ Jumai said.

Something hit them. There’d been no warning, and they were so close to the Winter Palace that even a kinetic-energy slug arrived almost instantaneously. The Quaynor shook, and kept shaking, as the energy of the impact whiplashed up and down her chassis. Two or three seconds later, the habitat scored another strike. In the neurotic jitter of his vision, Geoffrey caught Mira Gilbert studying a schematic: an outline of the ship with the damaged areas pulsing an angry red. He wanted to speak, wanted to ask how serious the injuries were, but Eunice still had him in her thrall.

Then it quietened – there were no more impacts – and just as miraculously the acceleration eased, smoothed, reduced to zero. They had transited the volume of maximum hazard.

The Quaynor gave one more creak, and then all was silent. Even the master-caution alarm had stopped blaring.

‘We’re clear,’ Eunice said. ‘My guns can’t touch us now – there’s a zone of avoidance around either docking