‘Is this one active?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘Wait a moment.’ Hector held up a finger, his lips moving slightly as if counting in his head. Then he jabbed the finger precisely. Geoffrey caught a glint of brightness at the end of one of the launchers.
An instant later something razored a cold blue line across the display.
Then the blue line hazed, feathering like a vapour trail. He watched it darken to black.
‘Package shot, on the nose,’ Hector said. ‘Once every ninety seconds. We’ve been tracking them since we got visual.’
‘A package of what?’
‘Processed ice, of course. Water, most likely, although it doesn’t have to be. Boosted at high-gee in a magnetic cradle, followed by a shove from ablative pusher lasers once it’s cleared the launcher. The lasers do most of the work. They can steer the package for quite some distance after launch by applying off-centred ablation. What you saw there was a vapour trail: the package’s own steam-rocket exhaust.’
There was pride in Hector’s voice; pride in a complex technical process working to plan. Geoffrey understood, or thought he did. Hector wasn’t just thinking of this one launch event, or even this one iceteroid. He wasn’t thinking of that single package, beginning its long fall home. He was thinking of the thousands of Akinya assets in the Kuiper belt, the tens of thousands more among the asteroids and iceteroids. Machines doing their work, tirelessly and efficiently, injecting ice and organics and metals into the vacuum, a corpuscular flow that most people barely knew existed. It didn’t matter that this one package would take years or decades to reach its customers. What mattered were the thousands, millions, just like it already on their way ahead. That was the grander machine right there: a single industrial plant wider than the orbit of Neptune. A web of conveyor belts, centred on the sun and its little clutch of warm, inhabited worlds.
Not just any industrial machine, either. One that his family had brought into being, with blood and toil over a hundred hard years. They had built this machine and made it tick and whirr like a Breitling.
The launcher flashed again. The vapour trail gashed an electric-blue wound across his sight.
‘Then we’re wrong,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Or this isn’t where the ship came from originally. If that iceteroid’s still being mined—’
‘That doesn’t prove anything,’ Hector said. ‘A cubic metre of processed water ice, every ninety seconds? That’s nothing compared to the mass of that ’roid. Even if we’d been tapping it for a hundred years, we’d only have extracted a few dozen megatonnes by now. Of course, the ice has to be refined, and some of it’s used for the fusion generators powering the launchers and mining gear . . . but we’re still talking about an insignificant fraction of the total mass.’
‘He means there’s still plenty of room for something else to be going on in there,’ Jumai said. ‘I think.’
‘This is just camouflage,’ Hector agreed, ‘to keep prying eyes from looking too closely.’
‘Until now,’ Geoffrey said.
The iceteroid’s slow rotation gave it many possible launcher trajectories. Depending on demand, there were few places in the system it couldn’t lob a package towards. Most of them would be aimed squarely at Mars, which was by far the biggest consumer of water ice and organics. A smaller fraction would be shot Moonwards, silvered with a monolayer of reflective insulation, or aimed at Saturn or the Jovian settlements. The gas giants might be used to slingshot or laser-steer payloads elsewhere, if demand patterns shifted in the intervening time.
What could be aimed at a point in the sky, of course, could always be aimed at an approaching ship.
‘We should be wary,’ Hector said, apparently following the same thought train as Geoffrey and reaching a similar conclusion.
‘Eunice arranged for us to come here,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We can be certain of that.’ But he could understand Hector’s trepidation. Hector had already run afoul of Eunice’s secret arrangements, and his own ship had been ripped to shreds by her hair-trigger defences. He did not need to have witnessed the attack on the
‘Even if I trusted her not to screw up,’ Jumai said, ‘sixty years is a long time for stuff to keep working. She may have programmed this ship to return to Lionheart, and she may have programmed Lionheart to expect it. But what if some part of that plan didn’t make it through the intervening years in one piece?’
‘Do we have external comms?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘We can send and receive between us and Earth, if that’s what you mean,’ Jumai said. ‘There’s a message waiting for you, actually. Do you want to take it privately?’
He looked at Hector before answering. ‘I don’t think there are any secrets between us now, are there?’
‘Perhaps not,’ Hector said.
As he’d expected, the message was from Sunday.
‘I’ll keep this brief,’ her figment said. ‘If you’re where we think you are, round-trip time for this message is going to be close to ten hours. Firstly, I hope you’re all safe and well. We tracked your exhaust until the point when the engine shut off, by which time you were moving faster than any manned ship in history. We didn’t see your slowdown, but that’s to be expected: you’d have been firing away from us by then, and most of the radiation would have headed out of the system, not back towards us. We haven’t been able to tap into telemetry from the ship, but aside from its speed, it looked to be functioning normally. Of course, if you’re hearing this, we can presume that you’ve been brought out of hibernation. As to what you’ll find in Lionheart, I’m afraid I can’t give you much help. There’s a lot to catch up on, brother. I’m with Lucas now: he told me what happened in the Winter Palace. I’m back on Earth, too – you’ll know that from the quangle tags. I came back the fast way, on one of our own ships. What happened in the Evolvarium . . . it’s complicated, and I’m still not sure I understand it all.’
Sunday hesitated, before continuing: ‘The Pans cheated us, Geoffrey. Truro, Holroyd . . . the man I met on Mars. Whether that means we can’t trust them at all, or that we can still trust some of them . . . I don’t know yet. I think we can still trust Arethusa, and I don’t have any doubts about Chama and Gleb . . . but whether they still count as Pans is harder to say.’ She flashed a triumphant grin. ‘They didn’t win, that’s the main thing. By now I’m fairly sure they’ll have realised as much, which is why I don’t really give a shit if they’re listening in to this transmission. Are you hearing this, Holroyd, Truro?’ Sunday raised a screw-you finger. ‘We duped them – left them holding a decoy, while I got out with the real thing. I spoke to . . . a recording of Eunice. She told me that one of us needed to get to the Winter Palace.’ Sunday smiled again. ‘By which time you were already on your way. I wish I
