Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

‘I’ll remind you that I’m still in the room,’ Eunice said.

‘We know.’ Geoffrey glanced at his cousin, seeing in his eyes that Hector was willing to accept the proxy’s intervention, for now.

Hector’s hands moved to the manual steering controls. ‘Thruster authority is ours. We’ll begin vehicle translation under Eunice’s guidance. Jumai – this could get messy.’

‘I can take messy.’

‘I mean, it might be an idea for all of us to get into suits at this point. Go down to the locker, fix yourself up with one of the units, then slave the other two to yours and bring all three back here.’

‘How do I slave suits?’

‘You ask them nicely,’ Hector said.

They really needed a name for the ship, Geoffrey thought. He was sick of calling it ‘the ship’, but didn’t feel comfortable about reverting to the name Winter Queen when it was so demonstrably not the same vessel Eunice had taken to the edge of the system. Given the affection he felt for it, Bitch or Murderess were looming as distinct possibilities. Perhaps they’d have time to debate the matter when they had docked with Lionheart.

They were turning. It was slow, agonisingly so. Spacecraft were not like aeroplanes, made for hairpin turns and acrobatics. They were more like skyscrapers or transmission masts, with a very narrow range of permissible stress loads. Apply too much torque and a ship as big as this one would snap like a stick of candy.

‘Two kilonewtons and hold,’ Eunice said. ‘Dorsal three, one kilonewton, five seconds.’ She was doling out commands like a stern instructress at a dance class. ‘Damn those centrifuge arms – they’re throwing off my calculations, too much angular momentum along our long axis. Why didn’t we stow them first?’

‘You didn’t suggest it,’ Hector said.

‘Dorsals four and six, one kilonewton each, three seconds. Aft: half a kilonewton, one second.’ She paused, studying the results. As in an aircraft, there was a deceptive lag between input and response. ‘That seems to be doing it.’

Eunice might have had the experience, but only Hector and Geoffrey were able to make the inputs. They were sitting next to each other, waiting on Eunice’s commands. Geoffrey could sense Hector’s tension, boiling off him like vapour. He’d spent half his life in space and had flown many different classes of commercial space vehicle. But nothing this big, this unfamiliar, or under such taxing circumstances.

By the time the ship had reorientated itself, Jumai was back from the suit locker. She was wearing everything but the helmet, her arm scooped through the open visor, and two other suits were shadowing her like zombies. She told them to stay put outside the command deck while she squeezed back into her seat.

‘They’re as modern as the hibernation units,’ Hector observed. ‘Give you credit, Eunice – you didn’t skimp on the essentials. Geoffrey – get into your suit. We’d best be ready for the worst.’

‘Anything from the iceteroid yet?’ Jumai asked.

‘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 .’