Blue Remembered Earth

request arrived the following morning, Sunday found herself putting down the coffee pot with a highly specific sense of dread. She accepted the bind with a profound and familiar foreboding.

‘I have some news,’ Chama said. ‘Probably the kind I ought to break to you first, so you can come round to my side and explain things to the others.’

‘This is going to turn out to have something to do with last night’s conversation, isn’t it?’

Boots tramped on metal flooring outside. Someone knocked on the door, vigorously.

‘Brother!’ Sunday called. ‘Can you get that for me?’

Geoffrey went to the door and returned to the kitchen with Gleb. The zookeeper looked harried.

‘This is not good,’ he said.

‘Chama,’ Sunday asked the figment, ‘why are you chinging in from outside the Zone?’

‘Because, given my current circumstances, it would be very difficult to ching in from anywhere else.’

Chama was strapped into a heavy black seat, sunk deep in its padded embrace. He wore the brass-coloured body part of a modern ultralight spacesuit, with the helmet stowed elsewhere.

‘You’re aboard a spacecraft,’ Sunday said. The tag coordinates were updating constantly, the last few digits a tumbling blur. ‘Chama, why are you aboard a spacecraft?’

‘Ever heard of striking while the iron’s hot?’

‘This is very bad,’ Gleb said, wedging his earpiece into place. ‘Sunday, voke me figment privilege, please. I want to be able to see and talk to him as well.’

Sunday already knew the answer to her next question, but she asked it anyway. ‘Chama, are you planning something that might upset the Chinese?’

‘That’s the general drift of things,’ Chama said, while Sunday voked the ching settings to allow everyone else to join in the conversation.

‘Your husband is here,’ Sunday said. ‘He’s not happy.’

‘Gleb, I’m sorry, but this wasn’t something we could sit around and discuss. You’ve always been more cautious than me. You’d have told me to put it off until later, to give it time to settle in.’

‘For good reason!’ Gleb shouted.

‘Had to be now or never. Look, I talked it over with the Pans in Tiamaat. I have . . . tacit authorisation. They’ll bail me out, whatever happens.’

‘You mean they’ll give it their best shot!’

‘They’re very, very good at this sort of thing, Gleb. Everything’s going to be fine.’

‘Whose ship is that?’ Sunday asked. ‘And how secure is this ching bind?’

‘The ship’s Pan-registered,’ Chama said. ‘It’s a short-range hopper, barely has the delta-vee to pull itself out of Lunar gravity but perfectly fine for ballistic transfers, and the occasional illicit touchdown. We’ve used it many times.’

‘And the bind?’ she persisted.

‘Quangled. So it’s very unlikely anyone’s going to be listening in, even the Chinese. Of course, they’ll be trying . . . but it’ll take a while to unravel the quanglement, and we have surplus paths lined up.’ He flashed a grin. ‘All the same, you should still know what you’re dealing with. Basically, I’m about to do something very naughty indeed.’

‘No,’ Sunday said. ‘We should never have discussed this, not even as an outside possibility. It was an idea, Chama, not a binding commitment.’

‘Want to join in? There’s enough capacity on this path to handle a few piggybackers.’

‘This is Akinya business,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’

‘Stopped being Akinya business when the two of you blabbed about it, elephant boy. Anyway, I’m doing you miserable, self-absorbed Akinyas a favour by putting my neck on the block here.’ Chama’s figment glanced to one side as a recorded voice began talking in a firm but not unfriendly voice. ‘Oh, here we go. First alert. Just a polite request to alter my course. Nothing too threatening yet; I haven’t even crossed the Ghost Wall.’

‘Turn around now,’ Sunday said.

‘Bit late for that, I’m afraid. Locked myself out of the avionics – couldn’t change course if I wanted to.’

‘That’s insane,’ she answered.

‘No, just very, very determined. Oh, wait. Second warning. Sterner this time. Notification of countermeasures and reprisals. Gosh, isn’t that exciting?’ His figment reached up and grasped the helmet that had been out of sight until then. ‘I’m not expecting them to shoot me out of the sky. Be silly not to take precautions, though.’

He lowered the helmet to within a few centimetres of its neck ring and let the docking magnets snatch it home, the helmet and ring engaging with a series of rapid clunks and whirrs. Save for a swan-necked column curving up from the nape to the crown, the helmet was transparent.

‘But you can come with me, Sunday. All of you can.’ Chama tapped commands into the chunky rubber-sealed button pad on his gauntlet cuff. ‘Be quick about it, though. Not going to have all the time in the world here, even if they let me get to the burial spot. Oh, I can see the Ghost Wall now. Very impressive. Very Chinese. Does anyone else maintain a consensual border hallucination even halfway as impressive?’

Sunday cut in on Chama’s monologue. ‘What you were saying, about this being untraceable? Are you absolutely, one-hundred-per-cent sure about that?’