Blue Remembered Earth

‘No, but there was a strong possibility of that happening. Had this all taken place in the Surveilled World, there wouldn’t have been much scope for treachery. But the Evolvarium gave them the perfect opportunity to commit an unwitnessed crime.’

‘I witnessed it,’ Sunday said.

Jonathan allowed a thin smile to play across his lips. ‘You don’t count.’

‘We’ll see about that, when I get back to Earth. They’re going to find out that I’m still an Akinya, and bad things happen when you cross us.’

‘Yes . . .’ Jonathan stretched the word, managing to sound less than entirely convinced by Sunday’s statement. ‘Funny how you’re so keen to slip back into the fold the moment you’re wronged. You’ve been running away from your family all these years, but the moment life throws something at you that you don’t like . . . you’re straight back into the arms of the household, a good little Akinya with the family behind her.’

Sunday bristled, but said nothing.

‘I don’t blame you for that,’ Jonathan continued, conveying entirely the opposite impression, ‘but it would be unwise in the extreme to underestimate the Pans. They’re not just a movement with a few ships and people. Behind the Initiative is the entire geopolitical armoury of the United Aquatic Nations. Take them on, you’re taking on half the planet.’

‘You’ve kept up with Earthside politics, then,’ Sunday said, her tone sour.

‘I may be dead, but I’m not a hermit.’

‘Well, it’s all for nothing anyway,’ Jitendra said. ‘We don’t have a clue what was in that box, and we can’t even prove they stole it. Without corroboration, the evidence of our eyes won’t be admissible in any court. Whatever’s in the box may mean nothing to them without Sunday’s background knowledge of Eunice. That’s assuming they ever gave a shit. Maybe all they wanted was for us not to get our hands on it. Well, they succeeded. We’re all losers now.’

‘The Overfloaters must have been surprised,’ Jonathan said.

‘Surprised by what?’ Sunday asked, irritated and fatigued.

‘That the object was still underground after so many years. Did they not express scepticism that it would still be there?’

‘Dorcas said it was strange that the machines hadn’t found it,’ Jitendra said. ‘But there it was.’

‘Or rather, there it wasn’t,’ Jonathan said. ‘Come, let’s go back downstairs. I have something you might be interested in.’

CHAPTER THIRTY

‘And there was I,’ Jumai said, ‘thinking maybe I’d get paid for nothing. Silly me. As if anything’s ever that easy.’

‘I didn’t mean to raise any unrealistic expectations,’ Geoffrey said.

They were moving side by side down the docking tube, brushing themselves along with fingertip pressure against the rough-textured walling.

‘Look at it this way, though,’ he went on. ‘You’re hoping this is going to do wonders for your reputation. Wouldn’t work if it turned out to be too easy, would it?’

‘Fuck my reputation. Right now I’ll settle for easy.’

They had matched the habitat’s spin in the moments before docking, but as they traversed the connecting tube Geoffrey still felt weightless, albeit with the sensation that the world was tumbling slowly around him. The docking tube was aligned with the Winter Palace’s axis of rotation, and he would therefore need to travel a lot further out before he felt anything resembling a normal gravitational pull. But even in the absence of visual cues that spin was impossible to ignore.

They were wearing spacesuits, of course: lightweight, hypermodern, form-fitting models from the Quaynor’s own equipment stores. Like the submarine harness in Tiamaat, Geoffrey’s suit had put itself on around him, splitting open, encasing him from head to toe and reassembling along a dozen improbable seams that were now completely invisible and airtight. Technology had come a long way since Eunice’s ancient gauntlet-like moonglove was state of the art.

Mira Gilbert’s mobility harness was not optimised for weightlessness, and since the station was presently denying aug reach, there was no way for Arethusa to ching a proxy. Given that someone had to physically enter the Palace to locate Hector, Geoffrey was glad it was just the two of them. Arethusa would want to know what they found, and she would ching aboard as soon as that became feasible, but for now the Pans would have to be patient. Even Eunice couldn’t stick her oar in.

They had passed without incident through the connected airlocks of the Quaynor and the Winter Palace, but now they came to the first obstruction: an internal door, armoured against pressure loss, blocked their progress. It was circular, cartwheeled with heavy bee-striped reinforcing struts. The manual control had no effect, and the door was certainly too large to force.

‘I keep having to remind myself, Hector didn’t come this way,’ Geoffrey said. ‘For all we know, this door hasn’t been opened in years.’

‘Give me a minute,’ Jumai answered. ‘I’ve cracked data vaults that haven’t been opened in a century. This is just warm-up stuff.’

Jumai had spent her time on the Quaynor profitably, packing a holdall full of anything she deemed useful. Now she rummaged through the bag’s weightless guts, pushing aside intestinal spools of data cables and stick-on sensor pads. She came out with a chunky rectangle of black plastic, geckoed it to the side of the door, over the operating panel, and connected a grey cable into her suit’s forearm.

She tapped a panel on the forearm, which sprang open to form a surprisingly large keypad and screen. The suits might be modern, but they’d been customised according to Pan specifications, which meant physical readouts and data-entry options.

‘What’s the story?’ Geoffrey ventured, when she’d been tapping keys and pursing her lips at scrolling numbers for several minutes.

‘The story is . . . we’re in.’