Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

Behind them, the command deck doors opened. Geoffrey twisted around in his harness, straining to see past the bulk of his seat. His heart skipped at the sight of a proxy, looming in the doorway. It was one of the shipboard units he’d seen earlier – a man-shaped chassis constructed from tubes and joints.

It was cradling a body, and he recognised it.

‘This female has suffered minor concussion, but is otherwise uninjured.’ The proxy spoke with the voice of the ship. ‘Shall I convey her to the medical suite?’

Geoffrey unbuckled his harness. They were still accelerating, but the thrust appeared to have levelled out at around one gee. He could move around in that without difficulty, provided he took care. ‘Do so,’ he said.

‘I thought you said you were alone.’

‘I thought I was.’

Hector was in the process of undoing his own restraints when a ching request arrived. Geoffrey voked acknowledgement and placed Mira Gilbert’s head and upper torso in the middle of the command deck. He voked Hector in on the conversation.

‘Unless someone’s spoofing the return signal, you’re alive,’ Gilbert’s figment said. ‘We’ve been trying to establish contact since… well, whatever it was that happened. We’ll get to that in a moment. Are you all right?’

Geoffrey took a moment to decide how to answer that question truthfully. ‘I’m fine… for the time being. Beyond that, things become a little murky. I’m with Hector – he’s OK as well. Since you seem to be alive, I presume Jumai got word through?’

‘Jumai reached the point where she was able to signal us. She told us to undock immediately and execute a safe-distancing manoeuvre. I told her I’d wait until she was in the lock, but she insisted on going back inside.’

‘I know. We just found her.’

‘How is she?’

‘I’m guessing she made it onto the ship just before we departed. She must have been knocked around a bit, but the proxy tells me there isn’t anything seriously wrong with her.’

Gilbert’s figment nodded. ‘OK – next question. The habitat’s gone. Presumably you worked that much out for yourselves. How much control do you have over Winter Queen ?’

‘None whatsoever, and by the way, this isn’t Winter Queen . It’s some other ship Eunice sent back in its place. Similar, but not the same. And there’s no sign that Eunice was ever here, either aboard this ship or anywhere in the Winter Palace.’

Hector shot him a warning look. ‘Any other family business you want to reveal, cousin?’

‘They already know more than you’d approve of – a little more won’t hurt.’

‘How can she not have been in the habitat?’ Gilbert asked. ‘Jumai said something similar, but we didn’t have time to get the full story out of her before she went off-air again.’

‘I don’t know,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘Obviously none of us ever dealt with Eunice except via ching… other than our housekeeper Memphis.’

‘All right. As important as that is, there are actually more pressing matters right now. You say you can’t control the ship – what have you tried?’

‘Everything,’ Hector said. ‘Flight plan’s locked in, and it won’t let us change anything.’

‘We’re tracking you, but we don’t have a handle on your trajectory yet. Where are you headed?’

‘If the ship’s to be believed,’ Geoffrey said, ‘an iceteroid in the Kuiper belt.’

Gilbert looked apologetic. ‘You won’t make it out of Earth–Moon space at this rate. You’re running way outside the safe operating envelope for that type of propulsion system.’

Hector looked sceptical. ‘You’ve figured that much out in just a few minutes?’

‘You’re lighting up near-Lunar space like a Roman candle. You need to find a way to throttle back, and urgently. At the very least, you’re going to burn so much fuel you won’t have a snowball’s hope of slowing down this side of the Oort cloud.’

‘The ship has its own ideas,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You’ll have to do something. You’ve already reached the point where no local traffic has enough delta-vee to catch up with you – and that includes Quaynor , I’m afraid.’

Geoffrey nodded, although a fuller understanding of the situation did not make it any easier to accept. ‘I need to check on Jumai. Maybe she can help us.’

‘We’ll keep reviewing the situation,’ the merwoman said. ‘In the meantime, good luck. I was about to wish you “godspeed”, but under the circumstances… maybe not.’

Getting to the medical suite had been more difficult than Geoffrey had anticipated. The central corridor had become a plunging vertical shaft, one that could only be ascended or descended using the recessed ladders Geoffrey had noticed on his arrival. He’d wanted to go down alone – he’d tried to persuade Hector to stay on the bridge, monitoring the situation – but his cousin had been determined to accompany him. They had been able to secure themselves to handholds and grabs as they worked their way down, but the process had been time-consuming and fraught with hazard.

There was something troubling about the provision of the ladders, though. Whoever had decided they were necessary must have known that the ship would be accelerating hard. That, and the ship’s confident assessment of their trip time to Lionheart, made it all the more difficult to accept that the engine was malfunctioning.

Geoffrey should have been encouraged by that, but he wasn’t. He didn’t like the idea of being trapped aboard a ship that was already travelling too fast to be intercepted.

‘I don’t remember what happened,’ Jumai said, when the proxy had brought her round to consciousness and the ship had confirmed that her injuries were minor, the concussion having no long-term consequences. ‘I was outside… and now I’m not.’

‘You remember Winter Queen ?’ he asked.

She considered his question for a moment before answering. ‘In the habitat, yes.’

‘You’re aboard it,’ Geoffrey said, before adding, ‘sort of.’

‘We’re prisoners,’ Hector stated gravely. ‘The ship has locked us out of its controls and we’ve been accelerating since we broke out of the Winter Palace. But it isn’t Eunice’s old ship, and we don’t really know where it’s taking us.’

‘We found your suit,’ Jumai said.

Hector nodded. ‘Geoffrey told me you both came aboard to find me. You were supposed to leave the station and get to safety before the charges blew. You remember the charges?’

She answered his question with one of her own: ‘What happened to them?’

‘I defused them,’ Geoffrey said. ‘But they were the least of our problems, as it turns out. The station was already counting down to its own demolition. It must have been designed this way, all those years ago – made to come apart, so that the ship could break out without damaging itself.’

‘Did you say this isn’t the Winter Queen ?’ There was a notch in her brow – a frown, or the crease of a headache, or both.

‘It looks the same,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but it’s younger, and it was built on the edge of the solar system. It’s also… doing things. Stuff that ships don’t usually do, in my limited experience.’

‘Your grandmother was a piece of work, do you know that?’

Geoffrey managed a graveyard smile. ‘I’m coming round to that conclusion myself.’

‘The ship is accelerating too strongly,’ Hector said. ‘That’s what the people outside think, anyway. But clearly we’re still alive, and the ship looks as if it’s been designed to cope with this kind of thing.’

‘You think Eunice gave it some tweaks?’