Blue Remembered Earth

‘Must be a systems glitch, then,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Something inside blew a fuse and the arms started up again. Or maybe it’s just to keep the air circulating, like a god’s own ceiling fan.’

Jumai scratched the back of her helmet, as if she had an itch. ‘Air’s breathable, you realise. Someone went to that much trouble. But I’m beginning to wonder if anyone ever actually put that to the test.’

‘Memphis would have breathed it.’

‘If he ever came this far. And if he did . . . well, he lied to you, didn’t he? Big time.’

Geoffrey wasn’t keen to follow that thought to its conclusion. ‘I see something,’ he said. ‘High above us, under the path of the centrifuge arms.’ He pointed, and Jumai followed his gaze to the indistinct form he’d sighted, pinned to the ceiling like a squashed fly.

‘Got to be Hector.’

‘He’s not moving.’ Somewhere in the suit there had to be a mode for zooming in the faceplate view, but Geoffrey couldn’t be bothered searching for it now. ‘I wonder if he even knows we’re here. There’s no aug reach, but suit-to-suit comms are still good . . .’ He didn’t want to voice the possibility that Hector might be dead, however plausible that now looked.

Jumai grabbed the holdall and broke into a surprisingly loose-limbed run, the suit easily accommodating her intentions. Geoffrey followed, keen to reach his cousin but anxious about what they might find. Whatever had hurt Hector might still be present. But where could anything or anyone hide, in this vast empty space? Unless Hector’s attacker had retreated back into the far endcap wall, the only possible hiding place was the ship itself.

He didn’t like that idea at all.

Even running against the spin of the habitat, Geoffrey didn’t feel his own weight varying to any perceptible degree. They cut diagonally, Jumai tossing out another flare along the way, and slowed to a walk when they were about a hundred metres from the suited figure. The centrifuge booms were still turning, and now that they were closer there was a clear whoosh each time one of the capsules swept by them. The arms were not moving particularly quickly – scarcely more than running pace, compared to the floor – but Geoffrey nonetheless had an impression of enormous, dangerous momentum.

Hector – who else could it possibly be? – was on his back, spreadeagled and motionless, staring straight up towards the central axis and the Winter Queen. Next to him, resting on the ground, was a white rectangular box like a big first-aid kit. Traceries of luminous arterial red ran down the suit’s matte-black limbs and defined the form of the chestplate and helmet. The Akinya Space logo glowed on the upper shoulder joint of the nearest arm.

Geoffrey approached the form, always keeping the centrifuge arms in view. As one of the capsules sped past him, he grasped what must have happened to his cousin. There was a door in the capsule: a dark circular aperture in the leading hemisphere.

‘Hector was trying to get inside.’

‘Figures,’ Jumai said slowly. ‘I mean, he would, wouldn’t he? Comes this way, finds things aren’t the way they’re meant to be . . . what else is he going to do but try to get aboard the ship?’ She took a step back as the other capsule whooshed by. ‘Think this was a surprise to him?’

Geoffrey had no adequate answer for that, only intuition. ‘I don’t like Hector,’ he said. ‘Don’t trust him, either. But I don’t think he was expecting to find this place empty.’ He got up close to Hector’s visor, trying to make out the face behind the glass.

There wasn’t one.

‘The suit’s empty.’

Jumai knelt down and double-checked, as if he could possibly have been mistaken. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘He must have removed the suit, then told it to wait here for him. That’s what it’s doing – just lying there, waiting.’

‘I know there’s air in here, but why would anyone be lunatic enough to get out of a perfectly good spacesuit?’

Geoffrey looked at the next centrifuge pod to swing past them, at the tiny door in its side. A suited figure could squeeze through that aperture – there’d have been little point in having it otherwise – but it would have been all but impossible to time the transition from floor to moving component. Unencumbered by a suit, though . . . and for a man who was fit and agile enough to play both tennis and polo and excel at both . . . Geoffrey wondered.

‘I think he wanted to get aboard the ship. He couldn’t do it with the suit on: too sluggish, too clumsy. So he got out of it. Told it to wait here, until he was ready to leave.’

‘We haven’t seen him,’ Jumai said. ‘There’s another way out of the Winter Palace, of course.’

‘But he wouldn’t have left without putting the suit back on. I think he’s still inside the ship.’

Cautiously, as if he might be working a jack-in-the-box, Geoffrey eased open the cover on the white container and saw four small cylindrical devices, packed like stubby beer bottles. There were four empty spaces next to them. He tugged one of the plump cylinders out of its cushioned support matrix.

It was heavy and cold, with a sturdy flip-up arming mechanism built into the cap. The label was in Swahili, with other languages printed underneath in smaller type. ‘“Caution: metastable metallic hydrogen,”’ he read. ‘“This is a variable-yield explosive device. Do not tamper with, shock or expose to temperatures in excess of four hundred kelvin, magnetic fields in excess of one tesla, or ambient pressures in excess of one hundred atmospheres. If found, immediately notify Akinya Space, Deep-System Resources.”’

‘You don’t think he came with just the four, do you?’ Jumai said.

‘Perhaps. On the other hand, maybe he took the other four into the ship.’

‘And set the fuses. And then issued a distress call, because something happened to him in there.’ Jumai was speaking very slowly, as if she did not much care for the direction her thoughts were taking her. ‘Something that meant he couldn’t get back out again on his own.’

‘We might be in trouble,’ Geoffrey said.