Blue Remembered Earth

‘No . . . I consented to this.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I had immediate access to the top-layer files. It’s an old system, but easy enough to navigate. At first, it was more than willing to let me have access.’

‘And then?’

‘I hit a point where it wouldn’t let me go any further. Detailed construction history, navigation logs . . . all that was blocked. No time to look for workarounds. But the ship said I could have access to everything I wished, provided I proved that I was Akinya. I didn’t question it. Why wouldn’t the ship want to know that I was family before giving me its deepest secrets?’

‘So you let the cuffs close around you.’

‘I had to buckle in first: the blood-sampling system wouldn’t activate until I was secured. That was foolish . . . but I didn’t have time to sit and weigh the options. I wanted to know, very badly. And I assumed the ship would take a drop and release me again.’

The acceleration had been rising steadily ever since their departure, and it was a long time since Geoffrey had felt the ship crash into anything. Whatever remained of the Winter Palace, they must have left it far behind by now. He hoped that Jumai had got to safety, and that the Pans had managed to undock their ship in time.

‘How did you call for help?’

‘Still had a comm-link to my suit, and my suit could still get a signal to the Kinyeti.’

‘You didn’t tell Dos Santos much.’

‘I told him I needed help. I knew he’d come as quickly as possible. There was still time to get me out.’

‘After the ship had taken the blood sample . . . did it keep its word?’

‘Yes,’ Hector said. ‘That’s how I found out that this isn’t Winter Queen. It’s . . . something else. I found the construction history. This ship is sixty-two years old. It was built in 2100, when Eunice was off on her final mission. Winter Queen was a good twenty years older than that.’

Geoffrey nodded to himself, thinking that he understood Hector’s error. ‘Something happened out there, that’s all. Her previous flight logs got wiped somehow, and everything was reset to zero.’

Hector sighed. ‘All the files cross-matched. Nothing had been erased or lost. This ship only ever made one trip. It was built in deep space, and it came back to Lunar orbit, where it’s been ever since. Box-fresh.’

‘What do you mean, built in deep space?’

‘Unless the files are lying . . . this ship was manufactured on one of our Kuiper belt assets. A dormant comet, orbiting beyond Neptune.’

‘You make igloos out of ice, Hector, not ships. I know that much.’

‘I realise this is painful for you, Geoffrey, getting up to speed with what your own family has been doing for the last hundred years. Of course you can’t make anything out of ice and dirt: that’s not why we went to the Kuiper belt, nor why we spent a fortune planting flags all over anything bigger than a potato. We mine those iceteroids for what they can give us: water, volatiles, hydrocarbons. We send robots and raw materials out there and they build mining and on-site refining facilities, and then they package the processed material and catapult it back to us on energy-efficient trajectories. The robots and raw materials come from our facilities on the main belt M-class asteroids, where the metals are. It’s a supply chain. Can you grasp that?’

‘You still haven’t told me how a ship could originate on a comet.’

‘There are metals and assembly facilities in the Kuiper belt. We put them there, to mine the volatiles. Thousands of tonnes of complex self-repairing machinery, serviced by Plexus machines – even more tonnage. And that infrastructure was already in place by 2100, already earning back our investment.’

‘You’re saying it could have been reassigned to make a ship?’

‘Saying it’s possible, that’s all. Maybe illegal – there’d have been any number of patent violations, unless our subcontractors were somehow in the know – but it could have been done. If Eunice wanted to build a copy of her ship, she had the means. All she would have needed were raw materials and time.’

Geoffrey closed his eyes. It wasn’t just the steadily mounting gee-load, although that was a part of it. He needed to think. If they were on VASIMR propulsion now, the power plant was surely being pushed to its limit. He remembered how leisurely the departure of Sunday’s swiftship had appeared.

‘And secrecy,’ he said.

‘She had it. The Kuiper belt’s a long way out, and it’s not like anyone else was living anywhere near that asset.’

‘Want to hazard a guess as to where we’re headed?’

Hector looked at the trajectory display, but it was clear that he’d already digested the salient details. ‘If that’s to be believed, then we’re going a long way out.’

‘Maybe back to the ship’s point of origin?’

‘If I could get out of these restraints, maybe I could query the ship.’

Geoffrey struggled against his own cuffs, but they were still holding him tight. ‘We’re safe now, though,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘The ship clearly wanted to make sure one or both of us was family, so it had to test our blood. It may also have wanted to cushion us during the escape phase. But that’s over – so why would it insist on holding us here now?’

‘Is that a rhetorical question, cousin?’

‘Release me,’ Geoffrey said.

The cuffs relinquished their hold, as did the ankle restraints. He was still buckled into the seat, and while the ship was under acceleration it might make sense to stay that way, but he was no longer a prisoner of the chair.