Blue Remembered Earth (76 page)

‘Not a squeak,’ Geoffrey said. He eased out of his seat, selected one of the two remaining suits and spread his arms and legs wide, like a man waiting to be measured by a tailor. ‘Dress me,’ he told it, and the suit obeyed, clamming itself around his body until only his head remained uncovered. Grimacing – the suit had pinched a fold of skin around his thigh – he scooped up the helmet and returned to his seat, leaving Hector to repeat the process with the other suit.

‘Aerobrake is aligned,’ Eunice declared, when everyone was secured. ‘We’ll initiate the approach now. Laterals one, three, six: two kilonewtons, ten-second burst.’

Geoffrey felt the push of acceleration. Almost as soon as he’d counted to ten in his head, it was over. They were weightless again, drifting towards Lionheart.

‘Package launches continuing on schedule,’ Jumai said. ‘That’s a good sign, isn’t it?’

‘As long as they keep away from us,’ Hector said.

For all the countless billions of tonnes of ice still to be mined out of the iceteroid, its gravitational field was puny. They would not be landing on Lionheart, in any strict sense of the term; rather they would be docking with it. There was a part of Geoffrey’s mind that couldn’t really accept that, though. As the iceteroid swelled to dominate the displays, ominous as a bloodstained iceberg, blood that had coagulated to a dark, scabrous red, his brain began to insist that there was a definite up and down to the situation. It took a conscious effort to stop clutching his seat rests, as if he was in danger of falling ahead of the ship.

‘Nine kilometres to dock,’ Hector reported. ‘We’ll need slow-down thrust if approach control doesn’t kick in. Jumai: keep signalling. We may break through at the last moment.’

‘Do you have the faintest idea what we’re going to find in that thing?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘I was hoping you’d have all the answers, cousin.’

‘There are going to be a lot of people very interested in getting a closer look at this ship. Maybe Lionheart has something to do with that.’

‘I’ll remind you that this remains Akinya commercial property,’ Hector said. ‘People will get to look at it if and when we choose. I may have been wrong about wanting to keep Eunice’s legacy locked away, I’ll admit that much. But that doesn’t mean I’m about to neglect my obligations to the family.’

Under other circumstances, Geoffrey might have taken that for a goad. But all he heard in Hector’s words now were weariness and resignation, the drained convictions of a man surveying the grave he’d just excavated for himself.

‘It really matters to you,’ he said, marvellingly.

‘Of course it does.’ Hector sounded surprised that it needed stating. ‘That doesn’t make me a monster, any more than rejecting the family makes you one.’

‘Seven kays,’ Jumai said.

They had always known that Lionheart had the means to strike at them without warning, but it was quite another thing to have that truth demonstrated with such spectacular indifference to their sensibilities. The ice package emerged on schedule, ninety seconds after the last, but as it boosted from the launcher the steering lasers pushed it through nearly ninety degrees. All this happened too quickly to analyse: the first they knew of any strike was when the ship shuddered violently, and then kept shuddering, pitching and yawing as if on a rolling sea. Geoffrey braced for decompression, or something worse, but the air held. His heart racing, he searched the schematics for signs of damage. But Hector was quicker.

‘We just lost a centrifuge arm – it wasn’t shielded by the aerobrake. The other arm’s still revolving – it’s acting like a counterweight.’

‘We should be able to stop it.’ Geoffrey sounded calmer than he felt. ‘Slow it, lock it down or something.’

The pitch and yaw were ebbing; they hadn’t done anything, so the ship must have sensed the damage and acted accordingly. Geoffrey glanced at the console chronometer, counting back in his head. How many seconds had it been?

Hector’s hands returned to the steering controls. ‘Arresting forward motion.’

‘You’ll need to do more than that,’ Eunice said sharply. ‘You’ve been sucker-punched. Ship’s still drifting off-axis. You’ll lose aerobrake protection in about thirty seconds. Dorsal three, two kilonewtons, three seconds. Hit that mark.
Now
.’

‘Overcorrecting,’ Hector said, when the input had had time to feed through.

‘You were slow. Laterals one and six, two kilonewtons, two seconds. Geoffrey: dorsal four, one kilonewton, one second:
hit it
.’

‘We’re still drifting,’ Jumai said after a few moments.

‘It’s coming under control. Switch to vernier thrust. Laterals one and three, dorsals two and five: five-second micro-bursts.’

‘Aerobrake is beginning to realign,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Good. Hold this drift for another ten seconds. Stand ready on laterals two and five, two-second bursts. That should kill it.’

When the ship was at rest, holding station relative to Lionheart, Hector said, ‘The remaining centrifuge arm is static and locked down. I don’t think we lost much air – the internal doors must have shut tight as soon as the centrifuge broke away.’

‘Do you think we should pull back to ten kilometres?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘We were fine until we tried moving closer.’

Hector was already unbuckling from his seat. ‘Maybe we were, but if we do that we’re just back to square one – drifting with no fuel to get home. As far as I can see, there’s only one course of action now.’ He pushed himself from the seat, spinning around in the air. ‘I’m going to reach that airlock, disarm the security system.’

‘Across seven kilometres of open space?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Better than ten.’ Hector stabilised himself, brushing fingertips against the wall, and opened the door.

The ship shook again. The impact was much louder this time, and it triggered an avalanche of damage and warning indications. The after-vibrations rumbled like a passing express train, dying away over tens of seconds. ‘Direct hit against the aerobrake,’ Jumai said, when the diagnostic messages had localised the impact point.

‘Even if we started pulling back now, it wouldn’t make any difference,’ Eunice said.

Geoffrey and Jumai abandoned their seats. ‘There has to be an alternative,’ Geoffrey said. ‘If we give ourselves enough drift away from Lionheart, we’re bound to fall out of range eventually.’

Hector was about to lower his helmet into place. ‘Not how it works out here, cousin. Provided Lionheart can see us, it can hit us.’

‘He’s right,’ Eunice said. ‘Unless you can find another comet to hide behind, you have very little choice. The aerobrake won’t hold indefinitely.’

Jumai and Hector were both now fully suited, with helmets on, although Jumai had not yet locked her visor down. Hector was on suit air: an image of his face, distorted and enlarged, had appeared on the external surface of his visor. He’d become a cartoon character of himself.

‘Senseless the three of us crossing at the same time,’ Hector said. ‘Jumai knows more about security countermeasures than either of us, but if she runs into a gene-locked system she won’t be able to disarm it. Besides, it’s not her mess. That leaves you and me, cousin.’

‘Fine,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We’ll cross together.’

‘Better if I cross alone, then you bring the ship in when I give the all-clear.’

There was another impact, just as brutal as the last.

‘At this rate, there won’t
be
a ship left to bring in,’ Geoffrey said.

Hector opened his mouth as if to argue, then closed it and nodded once. ‘Follow me and I’ll show you how the manoeuvring units work. Eunice, stick by us. You might come in useful yet.’

Geoffrey should have anticipated a complication, but it wasn’t until they had the thruster packs clipped on that he began to grasp what the difficulty might be. It wasn’t with the packs themselves: as soon as he studied the controls, nestling under his arms like seat rests, Geoffrey understood what Hector had meant when he said that the operation was intuitive.

But they were bulky. At a push, two suited people could have squeezed into the ship’s midsection airlock. With the thruster packs in place, the lock could only take one person at a time.

‘We’ll still go over together,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Cycle through and wait on the other side until I get there. We’ll start our crossing after the next package arrives.’

Hector’s cartoon face nodded. ‘That’s a good idea. At least we’ll have ninety seconds of clear time. If we can get close enough to Lionheart, she may not be able to steer one of those packages onto us.’ He reached out a gloved hand and tapped the airlock control. ‘See you on the other side, cousin.’

The ship jolted. Hector propelled himself into the airlock and closed the inner door. The indicator next to the door flicked to red, signifying that decompression was in progress. ‘Ninety seconds,’ Geoffrey said on the pre-assigned suit-to-suit channel. ‘That one felt pretty bad.’

The inner door twitched in its frame, jamming tight into its pressure seals.

‘He just blew the outer door,’ Jumai said, astonished. ‘Didn’t wait for the chamber to depressurise!’

‘Hector, what are you doing? You’ve just dumped a roomful of air!’

‘We won’t miss it, and it was a damn sight quicker than waiting for the normal cycle,’ Hector said, sounding pathologically calm under the circumstances. ‘But don’t worry. The outer door’s closing normally, and it will still hold air. In a minute or so standard pressure should be restored.’

‘He’s leaving,’ Jumai said. She had her open visor pressed up against the inspection porthole next to the airlock.

‘Hector! We had an agreement!’

‘Senseless both of us taking this risk, Geoffrey. You put your neck on the line when you came aboard this ship to find me. It’s only fair that I reciprocate.’

Jumai worked the lock, forcing it to cycle back to readiness. ‘Going to take a while. You can dump air a lot faster than you can pump it back in, and the inner door won’t open until there’s atmospheric pressure on the other side. Maybe if I had an hour I could find a workaround, but—’

‘Never mind.’

Forcing himself to concentrate, Geoffrey stared at the thruster-pack controls again. They’d looked simple at first glance, but that had been with the understanding that Hector was going to show him the ropes once they were both outside.

‘I have to follow him,’ he said. ‘If I don’t, I’ll never be able to look myself in the face again. But you stay here. We need one warm body back on this ship. The proxy doesn’t count.’

The ship jolted again.

The airlock indicator flicked to green, signifying readiness. Other than the venting of some air to space, no damage had been done by Hector’s sudden depressurisation. Geoffrey forced himself to breathe slower, though it did nothing to calm his racing heart. He was terrified. He didn’t want to go out there, into open space. He’d never been outside a spacecraft in his life, much less in a situation where he might be swatted out of existence at any moment. But he’d told Jumai the truth. He had to be able to live with himself, and if he left Hector to his fate, that abandonment would corrode him from within.

The airlock opened. Geoffrey pushed himself inside, clunking against the outer wall with excess momentum. He nodded at Jumai’s cartoon face, and then the inner door was closing.

The emergency vent control, the one that Hector must already have tripped, could not have been more obvious. It was a red handle the size of a shovel’s grip, recessed into the wall so that it couldn’t be activated unintentionally. Geoffrey took a good hold on it. There was another static handle next to it, providing a bracing point against the sudden decompression. He clenched that with his other fist.

‘Venting,’ he said.

He felt the tug as the air gasped from the lock but retained his grip. His head-up informed him that he was now exposed to hard vacuum. Geoffrey eased out of the lock, taking care not to knock the thruster pack as he emerged. His instincts were to retain a point of contact with the ship, but that wouldn’t get him anywhere. He had to submit himself to space, and trust in the harness.

He pushed away.

‘I’m free,’ he reported.

‘Can you see Hector? He’s out of my sightline.’

‘Must be on the other side of the aerobrake.’ Geoffrey positioned his hands over the matched thruster controls and applied a burp of thrust. ‘Hector, can you hear me?’

‘Still with you, Geoffrey. I gather you’re outside the ship.’

‘You knew I’d follow.’

Hector let out a sniff of amusement. ‘I suppose I’d have done the same thing. Doesn’t excuse either of us, though.’

The thrust had steered Geoffrey away from the hull. He looked back, seeing the ship in its entirety for the first time. The aerobrake was a braced circle blotting out a significant fraction of the sky, slightly dished on the surface he was looking at, aerodynamically convex on the other. Even with his eyes amped, there were details he couldn’t make out. The shadows were black, the lit surfaces gloomy.

He would have to edge out from the cover of the aerobrake if he was to follow Hector.

White light rimmed the circular shield, turning it into an eclipsed sun with its own corona. The light faded. He’d felt nothing, heard nothing, but he knew that another package had just hit the aerobrake.