Blue Remembered Earth

But he knew the truth. He didn’t need the helmet to tell him that. Hector wasn’t responding because Hector wasn’t there any more.

‘He’s gone,’ Jumai said. ‘Isn’t he?’

The two of them were still falling towards Lionheart, towards the point or surface in space where Hector had been intercepted and neutralised.

There wasn’t time for shock or grief, or even terror, over and above the fear that Geoffrey was already experiencing. Just the immediate and pressing calculus of survival. At his present rate of fall, Geoffrey would be passing Hector’s place of execution in only a dozen or more seconds.

‘Do nothing,’ he told Jumai. ‘No course adjustment, no speed adjustment, nothing. Not until we’re almost there.’

‘What happened?’

‘Hector must have directed a burst of thrust towards Lionheart. I don’t think it saw him until then. I don’t think it noticed him. He was just too small a target compared to the ship, and with all the debris floating around from the aerobrake—’

‘You hope.’

‘If I’m wrong, we’ll know it very shortly.’

He supposed that, of the myriad modes of death one might contemplate, being annihilated by a chunk of catapulted ice shot across space so quickly that it arrived without warning, was not the worst way to go. It would be painless. There would be no pain because once that ice touched him – once its kinetic energy began to convert into heat and mechanical forces – there would be no him to experience sensations of any kind whatsoever. He would no longer be an organism. He would be a pink nebula of rapidly expanding and cooling steam with some mixed-in impurities.

But he must have been right about Hector, because Lionheart refrained from killing him. He waited until the dull red world felt only a breath away, a hand’s reach. He didn’t dare begin to slow down until then. Although he knew that the suit had the ability to detect and avoid collisions autonomously, he wasn’t trusting it to arrest his forward motion. Closing his eyes – he did not want to see the ground coming up if it was clear he wasn’t going to stop – he jammed his thumbs onto the reverse-thrust studs. A few seconds passed before it occurred to him that if he didn’t monitor his progress, he might push himself back out into space again.

More by luck than judgement, he found himself settling gently down – or was it sideways? There was still no appreciable gravity – onto Lionheart. There was red ground below him, grey bunkerlike surface installations all around, veined with pipes and gridded with radiators. The tallest structure was a buttressed tower with docking clamps arranged around its top, wide open like a grasping hand. That was where the ship would have berthed, if their approach had been orthodox. The airlock had to be nearby.

His feet touched down, crunching into the surface as if he was breaking through the crust of a cake, into the soggy interior. That was just momentum, not his own weight.

‘I see you,’ Jumai said.

She came down like a strobing angel, and at first he feared that she’d initiated slowdown too high up; that she might yet attract Lionheart’s attention the way Hector had. But her judgement was no worse than his own. She landed a few metres away, and for a moment it was all they could do to stare at their own stupefied cartoon faces.

‘I’m sorry about—’ Jumai started saying.

‘Later,’ Geoffrey said, startled by his own callousness, but knowing that was how it had to be, until they were safe.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

They found an airlock easily enough, set at ground level. Geoffrey didn’t doubt that there was another one situated near the docking clamps, for the convenience of arriving ships. Jumai slapped her palm against the green-lit entry panel and the outer door opened without complaint. The iceteroid’s defences, geared towards the interception of arriving ships, paid no heed to anything happening on the surface.

There was room enough for both of them inside the lock, even with their thruster packs. The outer door closed; air gushed in through slats.

‘We’ve lost contact with the ship,’ Jumai said. ‘Eunice was right – the airlock’s blocking signals.’

When pressure normalised, Geoffrey took off his helmet and allowed it to drift down to the floor.

‘Eidetic scanner,’ Jumai said, directing his attention to a hooplike device set just below the ceiling. ‘And a gene reader, in that wall panel under the scanner. You’ll need to make skin contact with it.’

Geoffrey ordered the suit to remove itself. He stepped out, wearing just his inner layer, shivering as the coldness of the air touched him for the first time. He positioned himself under the eidetic scanner, remembering the similar device in Chama and Gleb’s menagerie. The scanner lowered down until it formed a halo around his head. The device would be primed to respond to visual memories of specific events or locations; it would easily be capable of distinguishing between memories laid down directly and those confabulated from second-hand experience. At the same time he pressed his bare palm against the grey rectangle of the gene reader. He felt the tingle as the reader drew a representative sample of skin cells.

‘State your name,’ a machine-generated voice said, in Swahili.

He swallowed before answering. ‘Geoffrey Akinya.’

‘State your relationship to Eunice Akinya.’

‘I am her grandson. Please cease attack on the approaching ship. It is not hostile. Repeat, it is not hostile.’

If the scanner understood his words, or cared about them, it gave no sign. The hoop tracked up and down, ghost symbols fluttering across his vision – weird and senseless hieroglyphs, in colours that the naked eye could not quite perceive: yellow-blues, red-greens. The scanner was pushing deep and intrusive fingers into his skull. It was reading the architecture of his brain the way a blind person might trace the profile of a human face.

‘Visualise the household, Geoffrey Akinya. You are walking through the west wing, away from the garden. It is late afternoon.’