‘And me,’ Gleb added.
‘Took your sweet time arriving,’ Sunday said.
‘Bandwidth was tighter than you said,’ Jitendra replied. ‘Kept being put on hold.’
‘That’s the Chinese,’ Chama said, ‘trying to break the quangle paths, or squeeze us on bandwidth.’
‘They can do that?’ Sunday asked.
‘Not difficult, if you’re a government. Diplomatic-priority transmissions, that kind of thing. Flood the bandwidth with a pipe-load of government-level signals that
‘What, in this context,’ Geoffrey said, ‘does “uh-oh” mean?’
‘Means I’ve just been given my final warning,’ Chama said happily. ‘Border enforcement interceptors are on their way.’
‘Could be a bluff,’ Sunday said.
‘Except that radar also has incoming returns, heading our way. Moving too quickly to be crewed vehicles. Probably just armed drones.’
‘Armed drones,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I can’t tell you how good that makes me feel.’
‘Deterrence,’ Chama replied dismissively, as if he’d said something very naive. ‘That’s all it’ll be. No one shoots things down any more. We’re not on Earth now.’
An impact warning started to blare. Those parts of the walling not taken up with windows, instruments and equipment modules began to strobe scarlet. Sunday saw Jitendra and Gleb flicker and vanish, and almost immediately felt puppet strings striving to yank her back into her own body, in the Descrutinised Zone.
She was there, for a heartbeat: standing up in her living room, in the middle of domestic clutter. Then she was back in the hopper, and her friends had returned as well.
‘OK,’ Chama said. ‘Change of plan. I’m taking us in steeper and harder than I was intending. This is all good fun, isn’t it?’
‘I’m in the middle of a major diplomatic incident,’ Jitendra said marvellingly ‘This was so not in my plans for the day when I woke up this morning.’
‘You’re not in the middle of anything,’ Chama corrected. ‘You’re observing. There’s nothing they’ll be able to pin on you for that. Oh,
He was talking to the hopper. It silenced its alarms and ceased strobing its warning lights.
Lunar surface scrolled past with steadily increasing speed as the vehicle lost altitude. Though it was day over Pythagoras, the crater’s high altitude meant that the shadows remained ink-black and elongated. There was little sign that people had ever come to this pumice-grey place; no glints of metal or plastic signifying habitation or even the arduous toiling of loyal machines.
But there were tracks. Against the ancient talcum of the surface, footprints and vehicle marks were immediately obvious to the eye. On Earth, they might have been taken for lava flows or dried-up river beds. On the Moon, they could only mean that something had perambulated or walked there.
Sunday had to adjust her preconceptions when she realised that the curiously stuttered vehicle tracks she was trying to make sense of were in fact footprints, and that the hopper was merely hundreds of metres above the Moon’s surface rather than several kilometres. They had come down much faster than she had thought.
‘There it is,’ Chama said, pointing ahead. ‘The place where your granny came back – see the scuffed-up ground?’
‘I can’t see anything,’ Sunday said.
‘Voke out the hopper. You have authorisation.’
Sunday issued the command – it hadn’t occurred to her before – and most of the hopper vanished. All that remained was a neon sketch of its basic outline, a three-dimensional wedge-shaped prism with Chama cradled somewhere near the middle. The golems, and Gleb and Jitendra’s disembodied heads and torsos, were flying along for the ride.
And now she could indeed see the disturbed ground where Eunice had returned, some unguessable interval after her long walk from the 2059 crash site. Everything was the same as in the aerial image Jitendra had shown them in the ISS: the touchdown marks from another ship, the hairpin of footprints where someone had crossed to Eunice’s original trail and then headed back to the ship. The area of dug-up regolith, like a patch of dirt where a horse had rolled on its back.
Nothing else. Nothing to suggest that anyone had beaten them to this place.
‘This is where it gets interesting,’ Chama said. ‘Here come the interceptors.’
Sunday tensed. She wasn’t in any conceivable danger, but Chama’s confidence might well be misplaced. It had been decades since any kind of lethal, state-level action had occurred between two spacefaring powers . . . but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen again, given sufficient provocation.
‘How many?’ Gleb asked.
‘Three,’ Chama said. ‘What I expected. Small autonomous drones. Demon-cloaked. You wanna see them? I can override the Chinese aug if you don’t, but they’ve gone to so much trouble, almost be a shame not to—’
The drones came in fast, swerving at the last instant to avoid ramming the hopper. In their uncloaked form they were too fast and fleet to make out as anything other than bright moving sparks. They might have weapons, or they might rely purely on their swiftness and agility to ram any moving object. Whatever they were, beyond any reasonable doubt they were rigorously legal. They might be operating within Chinese sovereign airspace, but they would still need to abide by the wider nonproliferation treaties governing all spacefaring entities.
