Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

‘Without anyone in the family knowing?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Only one person would have needed to know,’ Hector said, ‘and none of us would ever have had cause to question him.’

‘Memphis.’

‘Who better to supervise whatever provisions were needed? Materials and parts were being shipped up to the Winter Palace all the time, and not one of us batted an eyelid. How hard would it have been to slip six Hitachi hibernation caskets into one of those consignments? Hitachi would have had no reason to ask questions, and the units would have been installed by robots. Only Memphis would have had any real involvement.’

‘Memphis knew,’ Geoffrey said softly. ‘All this time. He knew.’

‘His loyalty to Eunice ran a lot deeper than we realised. He was ready to let the rest of us believe a lie because she asked him to. Even to the point of bringing back what we all thought were her ashes, and going through that whole scattering business.’ Hector was doing his best, Geoffrey saw, but he couldn’t quite keep the disgust out of his voice. He felt some of it himself. One thing to accept that Memphis had known things the rest of the family hadn’t. Another that he had been willing to lie to their faces, and put them all through… what, exactly?

He remembered Memphis meeting him, on the morning that the news of his grandmother’s death had come in. The cool, indigo-shadowed gatehouse; Memphis putting his arm around Geoffrey’s shoulders, offering strength and guidance when it was needed. All the while knowing that the Winter Palace not only did not contain a jungle, but had never been occupied. And if Eunice had not been living up there, and if the ashes Memphis had brought down were not hers, then what proof did they have that she had really died late last year?

‘The only remaining question,’ Hector went on, ‘is a simple one. Why?’

‘I can think of another,’ Geoffrey said, ‘although maybe they’re connected. If Eunice didn’t die in the Winter Palace, then where and when did she?’

‘You don’t even know for sure she’s dead,’ Jumai said quietly.

Geoffrey returned his attention to the iceteroid, shuttering out the thoughts he did not, for the moment, care to deal with. ‘So we just sit here, is that the idea?’

‘We can’t leave,’ Hector said. ‘All we have is short-range manoeuvring capability – enough to make final approach to Lionheart. I can’t believe that’s accidental.’

‘The ship’s brought us this far,’ Jumai said. ‘Ball’s in our court now.’

Hector voked an enlargement, zooming in on the central portion of the iceteroid. ‘It’s rotating very slowly,’ he said, ‘but I’ve corrected for that. This is what we’d see if we were hovering above a fixed point on the iceteroid’s surface.’

The image switched through a series of colour enhancements, revealing surface detail. Spidering out from a central focus were the radial lines and scratches of concentric structures, like ancient crater walls. He voked another enlargement. The zoom jumped to reveal a sprawl of silver-grey grids and modules, pressed into the surface like a child’s building blocks into wet clay. The concentric lines were pipes and tunnels connecting the blocks, the radial arms magnetic catapults. The focus was the main production shaft, bored deep into the iceteroid.

‘What we’re seeing here is more or less what I expected,’ Hector said. ‘There are production assets like this on thousands of Kuiper belt objects, running day and night, fully automated, for decades on end.’

‘Is this one active?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Wait a moment.’ Hector held up a finger, his lips moving slightly as if counting in his head. Then he jabbed the finger precisely. Geoffrey caught a glint of brightness at the end of one of the launchers.

An instant later something razored a cold blue line across the display.

Then the blue line hazed, feathering like a vapour trail. He watched it darken to black.

‘Package shot, on the nose,’ Hector said. ‘Once every ninety seconds. We’ve been tracking them since we got visual.’

‘A package of what?’

‘Processed ice, of course. Water, most likely, although it doesn’t have to be. Boosted at high-gee in a magnetic cradle, followed by a shove from ablative pusher lasers once it’s cleared the launcher. The lasers do most of the work. They can steer the package for quite some distance after launch by applying off-centred ablation. What you saw there was a vapour trail: the package’s own steam-rocket exhaust.’

There was pride in Hector’s voice; pride in a complex technical process working to plan. Geoffrey understood, or thought he did. Hector wasn’t just thinking of this one launch event, or even this one iceteroid. He wasn’t thinking of that single package, beginning its long fall home. He was thinking of the thousands of Akinya assets in the Kuiper belt, the tens of thousands more among the asteroids and iceteroids. Machines doing their work, tirelessly and efficiently, injecting ice and organics and metals into the vacuum, a corpuscular flow that most people barely knew existed. It didn’t matter that this one package would take years or decades to reach its customers. What mattered were the thousands, millions, just like it already on their way ahead. That was the grander machine right there: a single industrial plant wider than the orbit of Neptune. A web of conveyor belts, centred on the sun and its little clutch of warm, inhabited worlds.

Not just any industrial machine, either. One that his family had brought into being, with blood and toil over a hundred hard years. They had built this machine and made it tick and whirr like a Breitling.

The launcher flashed again. The vapour trail gashed an electric-blue wound across his sight.

‘Then we’re wrong,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Or this isn’t where the ship came from originally. If that iceteroid’s still being mined—’

‘That doesn’t prove anything,’ Hector said. ‘A cubic metre of processed water ice, every ninety seconds? That’s nothing compared to the mass of that ’roid. Even if we’d been tapping it for a hundred years, we’d only have extracted a few dozen megatonnes by now. Of course, the ice has to be refined, and some of it’s used for the fusion generators powering the launchers and mining gear… but we’re still talking about an insignificant fraction of the total mass.’

‘He means there’s still plenty of room for something else to be going on in there,’ Jumai said. ‘I think.’

‘This is just camouflage,’ Hector agreed, ‘to keep prying eyes from looking too closely.’

‘Until now,’ Geoffrey said.

The iceteroid’s slow rotation gave it many possible launcher trajectories. Depending on demand, there were few places in the system it couldn’t lob a package towards. Most of them would be aimed squarely at Mars, which was by far the biggest consumer of water ice and organics. A smaller fraction would be shot Moonwards, silvered with a monolayer of reflective insulation, or aimed at Saturn or the Jovian settlements. The gas giants might be used to slingshot or laser-steer payloads elsewhere, if demand patterns shifted in the intervening time.

What could be aimed at a point in the sky, of course, could always be aimed at an approaching ship.

‘We should be wary,’ Hector said, apparently following the same thought train as Geoffrey and reaching a similar conclusion.

‘Eunice arranged for us to come here,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We can be certain of that.’ But he could understand Hector’s trepidation. Hector had already run afoul of Eunice’s secret arrangements, and his own ship had been ripped to shreds by her hair-trigger defences. He did not need to have witnessed the attack on the Kinyeti to remain mindful of the possibilities.