The remotes were directed into the formal reception room. After all, wasn’t it Saint Yuri who said the best way to hide something was in plain sight? She frowned. Or was that Saint Callum?
The bedroom was next. When the remotes finished that, she lay down for a short rest . . .
Lounge.
Dining room.
Spa.
By the time the remotes scampered en masse into the entertainment room, Yirella had been in the captain’s quarters for nearly two days – eating, sleeping, fretting. The antique book she was flicking through almost dropped through her fingers when the remotes told her they’d completed their scan. Everything was normal. Nothing was out of place, nothing was hidden behind false panels, there were no concealed alien gadgets.
‘Shit.’
She got up and slid the book back into the shelf with all the others after a quick check of the images she’d taken to confirm it was in the right place. Kenelm had twenty volumes detailing the complete history of Falkon’s terraforming process. They’d been printed on that planet, according to the title page. Her hand rested on the spine. She didn’t move it away.
Kenelm clearly valued the books. And why not? They were important, a part of their heritage.
But why these?
Her brief flick through a few pages showed her they were spectacularly dull scientific papers. Even the illustrations were boring: bacteria, genetic sequences, three-dimensional graphs, a clone tank, laboratory equipment, assessment team expeditions, skyscraper-sized biologic initiators, orbital geological surveys.
She remembered Saint Yuri’s story, how he doggedly followed Saint Callum’s desperate hunt for his wife, Savi. How every good detective understood that people could be defined by what they considered important.
‘What am I not seeing?’ she asked, and pulled out volume one.
The
Avenging Heretic
Week Four
‘Gotta admit,’ Alik said. ‘This is my idea of exercise.’
Kandara just rolled her eyes in derision at male hormones as she pulled on her ubiquitous black singlet. There was barely enough elbow room for that in the tiny cabin. ‘Very flattering. You need to use the gym more. We don’t know how long we’re going to be doing this.’ She started hunting around for her sneakers. She saw them under the cot, beneath a tangle of his clothes.
‘I was hoping for quite a while.’
‘Idiot.’ She shoved his legs out of the way and sat on the edge of the cot to get her shoes on. ‘I mean the whole mission.’
‘Oh. Yeah.’ Alik’s stiff features compressed into a sulky frown.
‘Seriously? Second thoughts already?’
‘No. Just waking up to the sharp end of reality. Time is an abstract, you know. People don’t really grasp it properly. I think it’s because we’re all in denial about growing old.’
She gave his solid face with all its reprofiled muscle and plastic-sheen skin a weary glance. ‘Well . . .’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know. Don’t rub it in. Someone in my position has to go with the flow. Everyone on the Hill has more clone parts than original these days.’
She patted his legs. ‘Not any more.’
‘Hey, DC survived. Well . . . its shield was intact when S-Day started.’
‘I bet Rio’s a mess.’ For a moment she was back there, running along Copacabana’s hot sands with the young and exuberant, strutting their stuff under the sun. The smell of street stall food and suncream in the breeze, the bands playing along Avenida Atlantica living the daydream a viz-u producer would stop and beckon them over. Nightlife: the football supporters going crazy in bars, sirens of emergency bikes bulldozing revellers off the clear routes. Marches of pride, marches of protest, lovers alone in their world, families thronging the parks, everybody living good under the sun. The Carnaval – a beautiful, wild, joyous party of laughing maniacs winding its way along the streets like an earthbound rainbow.
No more.
And now this sterile, modified alien spaceship was the rest of her life. Probably coffin, too.
‘Sweetheart.’ Alik snorted. ‘The whole fucking world’s a filthy mess now.’
‘Yes.’ Sweetheart! Oh, Mary.
‘Hey, on the bright side, we’ll get to see it made new when this is over.’
She grinned in bemusement. ‘That is so not you.’
‘What?’
‘Optimism. That we’ll get to complete any stage of this insane mission, let alone finish it.’
‘So why are you here?’
‘Somebody has to be. What use am I back there? Now that the Salvation of Life is retreating, there won’t be another one-on-one fight on Earth until the Olyix reinforcements turn up – in twenty, maybe thirty, years’ time. I’ll be too old by then.’
‘Never!’
‘Now you’re just trying to get inside my pants.’
‘Can’t blame a guy for trying.’
‘You can stop. Both of us are practical adults.’
‘Okay. Tonight?’
‘Sure.’
His narrow smile tightened as his gaze slid across the shallow bulges on her forearms. ‘Hey, I thought you’d got rid of your peripherals . . .’
‘I did. The originals.’ She winked. ‘Then I got myself some new ones.’
‘Je-zus. But Lim said they might be dangerous when we’re in the tank. No one knows what long-term immersion will do to them.’
‘Yeah. Which is why Lim made these tank-proof ones for me in an initiator.’
‘Why the hell wasn’t I told they were available?’
‘Did you ask?’
‘Fuck’s sake!’
A grinning Kandara stepped out of his cabin into the main lounge. It was the lower third of the ship’s main cylindrical chamber, ringed by the tiny personal sleep cabins they used when they weren’t in their suspension tanks. That didn’t leave much floorspace, and the table occupied most of it. At least the mid-deck had room for the exercise machines, along with the washroom and a G8Turing-run medical bay, which she prayed she’d never need. Prejudice – but she preferred human doctors. Top deck housed the suspension tanks and their support systems. Her initial hope that they’d each get one of the other chambers for personal quarters was quickly dashed when the engineers started filling them with drones and printers and a batch of Neána-technology initiators. The old Olyix bio-gunk tanks were now full of
