Geoffrey had never been further than the Moon in his life. The sun was now more than thirty times as distant as it appeared from his home, and the light it offered was over nine hundred times fainter. It was a bullet hole punched in the sky, admitting a pencil-shaft of watery yellow illumination, too feeble to be called sunshine. For the first time in his life he truly understood that his home orbited a star.
And he felt some sense of the true scale of things. That bullet hole was still the brightest thing in his sky, but he could imagine it shrinking, diminishing, sphinctering tight as he fell further into the outer darkness. Until even that pencil-shaft became just a wavering trickle of ice-cold photons.
He smiled at that, because he had not even come a thousandth of a light-year.
The sun might have been the brightest thing in the sky, but it was not the largest. The iceteroid, which sat in the opposite direction – its visible face illuminated – was fifty kilometres across at its widest point. It was a dark- red potato, its hidelike surface only lightly cratered. Like all Kuiper belt objects, it had been ticking around the sun largely unmolested for more than four billion years. Once in a stupendous while, the gravitational influence of one of the major planets might kick a Kuiper belt object onto a cometary orbit. For the majority of objects, no such glory awaited. They would spend their existences out here, going about their lonely business until the sun swelled up. If, that was, humanity’s machines did not arrive first, to tap their riches.
‘Is it ours?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘If we are where the ship claims to be, then this is Lionheart,’ Hector said. ‘We should be able to cross-check that in a little while, but for the moment I see no reason to doubt it. We’ve come a long way, and that’s pretty obviously an iceteroid.’ He dragged his gaze from the display for a second to meet Geoffrey’s eyes. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘They say it gets easier.’
‘It does. But fifty-one days is a long stretch even for the seasoned space traveller. The cabinets are modern, though. There should be no lasting effects.’ He nodded at one of the schematic diagrams. ‘The ship has even redeployed its centrifuge arms. It wants us to be as comfortable as possible. We should all think about spending some time under gravity, even if we have to do it in shifts while someone monitors things from up here.’
‘You say the cabinets are modern,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Hitachi have been making them for a long while, but the ones we just used are not sixty-two years old.’
‘You said that’s how old the ship is,’ Jumai said.
‘Its basic systems are that old,’ Hector replied, ‘engine, hull, life-support, everything it needed to get back to Lunar orbit. Since then, though, it must have been outfitted with brand-new internal equipment. I suppose the cabinets may have been manufactured onboard, if the repair systems had the right materials and blueprints. But it’s far more likely that they were simply bought and shipped up to the Winter Palace.’
‘Without anyone in the family knowing?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘Only one person would have needed to know,’ Hector said, ‘and none of us would ever have had cause to question him.’
‘Memphis.’
‘Who better to supervise whatever provisions were needed? Materials and parts were being shipped up to the Winter Palace all the time, and not one of us batted an eyelid. How hard would it have been to slip six Hitachi hibernation caskets into one of those consignments? Hitachi would have had no reason to ask questions, and the units would have been installed by robots. Only Memphis would have had any real involvement.’
‘Memphis knew,’ Geoffrey said softly. ‘All this time. He knew.’
‘His loyalty to Eunice ran a lot deeper than we realised. He was ready to let the rest of us believe a lie because she asked him to. Even to the point of bringing back what we all thought were her ashes, and going through that whole scattering business.’ Hector was doing his best, Geoffrey saw, but he couldn’t quite keep the disgust out of his voice. He felt some of it himself. One thing to accept that Memphis had known things the rest of the family hadn’t. Another that he had been willing to lie to their faces, and put them all through . . . what, exactly?
He remembered Memphis meeting him, on the morning that the news of his grandmother’s death had come in. The cool, indigo-shadowed gatehouse; Memphis putting his arm around Geoffrey’s shoulders, offering strength and guidance when it was needed. All the while knowing that the Winter Palace not only did not contain a jungle, but had never been occupied. And if Eunice had not been living up there, and if the ashes Memphis had brought down were not hers, then what proof did they have that she had really died late last year?
‘The only remaining question,’ Hector went on, ‘is a simple one. Why?’
‘I can think of another,’ Geoffrey said, ‘although maybe they’re connected. If Eunice didn’t die in the Winter Palace, then where and when did she?’
‘You don’t even know for sure she’s dead,’ Jumai said quietly.
Geoffrey returned his attention to the iceteroid, shuttering out the thoughts he did not, for the moment, care to deal with. ‘So we just sit here, is that the idea?’
‘We can’t leave,’ Hector said. ‘All we have is short-range manoeuvring capability – enough to make final approach to Lionheart. I can’t believe that’s accidental.’
‘The ship’s brought us this far,’ Jumai said. ‘Ball’s in our court now.’
Hector voked an enlargement, zooming in on the central portion of the iceteroid. ‘It’s rotating very slowly,’ he said, ‘but I’ve corrected for that. This is what we’d see if we were hovering above a fixed point on the iceteroid’s surface.’
The image switched through a series of colour enhancements, revealing surface detail. Spidering out from a central focus were the radial lines and scratches of concentric structures, like ancient crater walls. He voked another enlargement. The zoom jumped to reveal a sprawl of silver-grey grids and modules, pressed into the surface like a child’s building blocks into wet clay. The concentric lines were pipes and tunnels connecting the blocks, the radial arms magnetic catapults. The focus was the main production shaft, bored deep into the iceteroid.
‘What we’re seeing here is more or less what I expected,’ Hector said. ‘There are production assets like this on thousands of Kuiper belt objects, running day and night, fully automated, for decades on end.’
