She reminded herself of that over and over, but her brain simply wasn’t wired to grasp scenery on Martian scales.
She hadn’t been able to sleep, not after the news from Earth. Geoffrey had called back and the update was no better than she’d been expecting, which was that Memphis had been dead for so long that there was no hope of recovery. She had no reason to doubt the truth of that. The one thing the family wouldn’t skimp on was medical expertise, and the doctors in Mombasa were as good as anywhere.
So Memphis was gone: an entire thread ripped out of her life without warning, a golden strand unravelling right back to her childhood. She couldn’t deal with that, not right now. She did not need consolation because she did not yet feel anything that she recognised as grief. Instead there was a peculiar vacuum-like absence of other emotions. It was as if her mind had begun to make mental houseroom, clearing itself of furniture it no longer needed. Something else was going to be moving in, for months or years. Sunday wondered how grief would feel, when it arrived.
Jitendra returned to the compartment looking brighter and better rested than she felt he had any right to. He’d gone to get himself some breakfast, Sunday apologising for not having an appetite, and hoping he didn’t mind eating on his own. He was finishing off a paper-wrapped croissant.
‘We’re nearly in Vishniac,’ he said, rubbing a hand over a freshly shaven chin to dislodge crumbs. He looked different, and it took her a moment to identify the change. Normally he kept his scalp shaved so that the transcranial stimulator could work effectively, but now his hair was beginning to grow back. ‘I’m guessing our ride will be waiting for us,’ he went on, between mouthfuls. ‘Sure you want to go through with this? It’s not too late to call it all off.’
‘It’ll take my mind off things,’ she said.
‘This happening, maybe it’ll knock some sense into those cousins of yours.’ He offered her the remaining half of the croissant. She shook her head. ‘You sure? Got to eat.’
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
But she didn’t feel fine. She felt sick and light-headed, not quite in her own body, as if she was elsewhere and a ching bind was collapsing. It was not simply the news of Memphis’s death, though that was a significant part of it. She had been feeling disorientated ever since Soya had contacted her in Crommelin.
Soya of the mirrored visor and the face that echoed her own.
That’s all it had been – an echo. Later Sunday had played back the retinal capture, and while Soya’s face was very similar to Sunday’s, it was not an exact likeness – although in the moment, with the distortion of the intervening layers of glass, she could forgive herself for thinking otherwise. But a family resemblance? Unquestionably.
Which threw up more questions than it answered.
She did not think she recognised the name, but in fact that had been her own memory at fault. Eunice’s mother, of all people, had been named Soya. But that particular Soya had been dead more than a hundred years, and at least as crucially she had never left Earth. Born in the second half of the twentieth century, she had, by the standards of her age, lived a long and blessedly happy life. But she had not lived long enough to see more than the first flowering of her daughter’s accomplishments. In any case, the images of Soya Akinya did not match the face Sunday had seen, even those few grainy still frames that existed of Soya as a young woman. The Akinya genes were present in both women, but they had expressed themselves quite differently.
How easy it would have been to run an aug trace, if she hadn’t been stuck in that tourist suit. But that had evidently been the point: not just to shield their conversation, but to disclose as little as possible about Soya’s true identity.
All of that was suitably destabilising, but what had unsettled Sunday just as much as seeing her own face was the warning Soya had given. Not that Sunday had ever assumed the Pans could be trusted unquestioningly – she would be naive not to think otherwise – but given the fact that she had no alternative but to trust them, what precisely was she meant to do with that information?
And how did Soya know about the Pans, and Sunday, and Eunice’s trail of breadcrumbs anyway?
It was not good to feel like a cog in a machine, even a willing and submissive cog. Who could she turn to now? Sunday wondered. Jitendra for love and affection, all she could wish for in a partner. But Jitendra couldn’t help her make the decisions now being forced upon her. Her brother? In a heartbeat. But Geoffrey was on another planet and all her communications to him went through the Pans . . .
That left Eunice, an art project she herself had assembled and breathed life into. A patchwork thing, a collage, a wind-up doll. Eunice might serve as a handy, easily queryable repository of all-world-knowledge relating to her late namesake, and she might have a few data-sniffing tricks up her sleeve, but the idea that Sunday might turn to the construct for counsel, for wisdom, for succour in a time of crisis . . .
That was ridiculous.
I’m Sunday Akinya, she thought. I’m thirty-five years old. I’m fit and well. I am not the ugliest woman ever born. Barring accidents I’ll probably see out another hundred and twenty years, at the very minimum. I’m a talented if obscure artist, I live on the Moon and I’m currently walking around on Mars, with my boyfriend, with an expense account some people would kill for, if killing were still possible.
So why am I not having fun?
The Vishniac railway station was much smaller than the one in Crommelin, and smaller than those at many of the intermediate stops they had made on the way. It was pressurised – the train had passed through an airtight collar as it dived underground – but the air was cool and it felt thinner in her lungs, somehow. That was undoubtedly an illusion, owing as much to her mental state as her knowledge that they had gained considerable altitude. A few dozen passengers had alighted, and it did not take long to verify that the golem was not among them. Sunday waited, apprehensively, until the train slid out of the station, picking up speed so quickly that she felt the air being sucked in its wake. Then it was gone, and there was still no golem.
There were no customs or immigration formalities for travel between Martian administrative sectors, so they were quickly through the station and into the shabby glitz of the Vishniac public concourse. It had the look of a place that had been fresh and modern about thirty years ago, but had since been allowed to fade. Sunday located the café where they had been told to meet Gribelin; it was tucked between a florist and a closed-for-business nail salon.
Their guide was already there, sitting by himself at an outlying table with one leg hooked over the other, sipping from a white coffee cup not much larger than a thimble. His bug-eyed goggles appeared to have been surgically grafted to his face. He was bald and cadaverous.
‘Mister Gribelin?’ Sunday ventured.
He set the coffee down on the glass-topped table with a precise and delicate chink and stood up, retrieving a knee-length leather overcoat from the back of his chair. He was tall even by Lunar standards, towering over both Sunday and Jitendra.
‘Can’t hang around,’ he said, without a word of welcome. ‘Your friend caught the next train out of Crom. He’s been right behind you all the way.’
‘How long does that give us?’ Sunday asked.
‘Two hours, maybe less. Means we’ve already pissed away most of our head start.’ He shrugged on the murky brown coat. It had wide shoulder patches and a collar that went halfway up the sides of his skull. Now that she had a good look at him, Sunday saw fine tattoos covering every visible piece of skin, from his face to his scalp and the back of his head. The tattoos were of weird little dancing stick figures, executed in primitivist lines and squiggles.
She had nothing against weirdness – hell, she lived in the Descrutinised Zone – but she’d been hoping for a driver who exuded quiet authority and confidence, not someone who looked borderline psychotic.
‘So much for your cousins seeing sense,’ Jitendra said gloomily.
‘Maybe t
he golem’s on autopilot. Either way, I’m not in the mood to talk to it.’
‘You all right?’ Gribelin asked her, casually, as if he had only marginal interest in the answer.
Her face was reflected back at her from his bug-eyes. ‘Had better weeks. Can we just get going?’
‘Sure thing, sweet cheeks.’
They took an elevator. In the enclosed space, Gribelin gave off a hard-to-place mustiness, like the contents of an old cupboard. A garage lay three or four levels under the concourse. It was pressurised and floodlit, but even colder than the public spaces above. Sunday coveted Gribelin’s coat and boots. The floor was covered with a tan-coloured tar of compacted oily dust that stuck to her shoes. They walked past rows of bulky machines, some of them as large as houses: cargo haulers, excavators, tourist buses, all mounted on multiple sets of springy openwork wheels.
‘Here’s your ride,’ Gribelin said, stopping at one of the trucks. ‘Don’t scuff the paint job.’
He cranked down a ladder and made his limber way up into the cab airlock. Halfway up he paused, looked down and reached for Sunday’s luggage. She passed him her bag, then Jitendra’s, and then followed him up into the vehicle, trying to kick as much of the muck off her soles as she was able. The paint, what remained of it, could fuck itself.
It was a six-wheeled truck with a crudely airbrushed dragon on the side. Up front was a rounded accommodation and command bubble, with engine and cargo space at the rear, comms blisters and deployable solar vanes on the roof, now tucked back like retracted switchblades. Clamped to the front like a trophy, under the chin of the command bubble, was an androform maintenance robot.
There was more room inside than Sunday had been expecting. Two small sleeping cabins – one for Gribelin, another for his passengers – and a mini-galley with four fold-down seats. They took seats either side of their guide in the command bubble. The truck smelled as musty as its owner, dirt and mould in the corners, cigarette burns in some of the upholstery.
Gribelin had one hand on a steering yoke, the other on a bank of power-selector levers. They hit the steep upgrade of the garage’s exit spiral; the truck laboured, then found its stride. Gribelin floored it, there was a lurch of wheelspin and then the curving walls were speeding by only a hand’s width from the wheel rims. They climbed and climbed, barely slowing when the ramp flattened and the truck barged through a trio of self-sealing pressure curtains.
Then they were outside. For a few minutes they rumbled along surfaced roads, between low banks of bunkerlike buildings with narrow slitted windows and faded, weatherworn plastic logos on their roofs. The roads were perforated sheets, raised up on stilts. Signs on masts advertised the businesses along the route, with enormous neon-lit arrows pointing off to airlocks and parking ramps. Power lines ran overhead, sagging low above the road and its intersections. It was sprawl, the outskirts of a one-horse town on a planet where even the biggest city was small by Earth or Lunar standards. Sunday saw a repair crew working with welding torches on part of the road, but no pedestrians at all.
The buildings thinned out and soon they passed through a gate in a concrete dust-wall, flanked by flashing beacons, beyond which the road abandoned its lofty ambitions and settled for being a two-lane dirt track. Boulders and large stones, bulldozed out of the way and left along the sides, formed a crude demarcation. Every few hundred metres they passed a transponder or beacon on a flimsy pole, and that was the extent of the road markings.
Not that it appeared to matter to Gribelin, who was only pushing the truck harder. Sunday watched the speedometer climb up to one hundred and sixty kilometres per hour. Dust billowed out of the wheels, and wind-sculpted undulations in the road caused the truck to nose up and down like a small boat in high seas.
‘How long until we reach the Evolvarium?’ she asked.
Gribelin made a show of opening a hatch in the dashboard and rolling himself a cigarette before answering, stuffing it with some dark-red weed.
‘Eight, nine hours,’ he said eventually. ‘Can’t be more precise than that.’
‘I wish we had more time on Lucas.’
He drew on the cigarette, examined it carefully before answering. ‘That your buddy in the train, the golem?’
‘He’s not my friend,’ Sunday said.
‘Figure of speech, sweet cheeks. Kind of obvious you’re not on kissing terms.’ The truck reached the summit of a hill; Gribelin upshifted one of the power-selector levers. They passed the wreck of another vehicle, turned turtle in the dust. ‘The golem’ll need to hitch itself a ride out of town, unless it’s planning on walking. Maybe you’ll get lucky and there aren’t any rides until morning. Who’s on the other end of the proxy?’
‘My cousin, back on Earth.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Same place you’re from, right?’
‘The Moon,’ Sunday said. ‘There’s a difference.’
‘Earth, Moon, just tiny pissholes in the sky here. What is this, some kind of family feud?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Next time, maybe give some thought to settling your scores back home.’ He scratched at the skin around the edge of his goggles. ‘Had enough Earthside politics exported up here to last six fucking lifetimes.’
‘Thanks for sharing. You’re being paid handsomely for this little job, aren’t you?’
He shrugged at Sunday’s question. ‘No complaints, sweet cheeks.’
‘Then please shut the fuck up until I ask you a direct question. I’ve just lost someone very precious to me and the last thing I need is a dose of small-minded Martian nationalism.’ She took a breath. ‘And if you call me “sweet cheeks” one more time, I’ll personally rip those goggles off and ram them down your windpipe.’
Gribelin grinned, took another draw on his cigarette and leaned over to say in Jitendra’s ear: ‘I’m liking her more by the minute. She always this way?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Whatever the Nevsky had just docked with – there’d been a dull metallic clunk as it engaged with something – Geoffrey knew it could not be the aqualogy. They hadn’t come far enough. Yet communicated in that clunk had been an impression of immense, dull solidity. A station, perhaps, rooted to the seabed, or a much larger ocean-going vessel.
Merpeople led them down damp black corridors of armoured metal with flume tubes stapled to the ceiling and water-filled channels sunk into the floor. Through doorways Geoffrey saw more merpeople, lubber technicians and robots toiling under bright lights, surrounded by pallets stacked with elaborately decaled cargo pods. A striding exo-clad merwoman was actually checking something off on a clipboard using a glowing-tipped stylus.
Shortly after he grasped that they’d arrived in the launching facility for one of Tiamaat’s surface-to-orbit lifters, they showed him the rocket itself.
Blunt-nosed and pale green, it sat in its silo like a cartridge in a chamber. Loading belts poked through the walls, thrusting across open air to reach into the lifter’s cargo bays. The lower part of the three-hundred-metre-tall rocket was already submerged. Even as Geoffrey watched, the tide rose perceptibly, lapping over the aerodynamic bulge of its engine fairings. They were flooding the chamber in readiness for launch.
‘Basically just a big bottle of fizzy water,’ Mira Gilbert said as they viewed the rocket from one of the silo’s observation windows. ‘Given a good shake, waiting for someone to pop the cork.’
The rocket’s fuel was metallic hydrogen. Geoffrey knew just enough about MH to be suitably unnerved being this close to so much of the stuff. Nothing exotic or rare about MH: it was out there in bulk quantities, found naturally in the solar system, absolutely free for the taking. The snag was that it only existed at the bottom of the atmospheres of gas-giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, where it had been formed by the brutal crush of all that overlaying gas. Under barely comprehensible pressures of many dozens of gigapascals, normal hydrogen underwent a phase transition to an ultradense electrically conductive state. The key
to MH was its metastability: after the pressure was withdrawn, it didn’t immediately revert to normal hydrogen. That didn’t mean it was safe, by any definition, just that it was stable enough to be transported and utilised as an energy-dense rocket propellant with a potential specific impulse far beyond anything achievable through purely chemical reactions.
They weren’t mining it yet. Akinya Space had a share in the programme established to develop MH extraction technology, literally lowering a piezoelectrically stabilised bucket into Jupiter’s atmosphere on a spiderfibre cable and ladling out the stuff, and there’d been some promising feasibility demonstrations, but doing that on a cost-effective, repeatable scale made space-elevator technology look like the work of Neanderthals. It was decades, maybe even centuries down the line, and a dicey investment given that MH had no clear economic application for deep-space propulsion, only the short-haul business of escaping planetary gravity wells. So for now they manufactured it, at ludicrous expense, in mammoth orbital production platforms, tapping the kinetic energy of incoming spacecraft to drive diamond-anvil pistons that were themselves as large and complex as rocket engines.
‘The tanks aren’t completely full of MH,’ Gilbert said. ‘That would be really terrifying. The MH tank is tiny, just a little bubble right down at the base of the vehicle. Problem with MH is that it burns hotter than the surface of the sun, and we still can’t make pumps or nozzles that can tolerate that kind of heat without melting. So we have to dilute it, to lower the burn temperature to the point where we can just handle the reaction, and for that we use liquid hydrogen.’