Blue Remembered Earth (64 page)

Vertigo gripped him. He caught his breath and closed his eyes.

‘Easy,’ Jumai said.

He forced his eyes open. ‘Has to be a better way.’

‘Probably is, if we’d come in through the other lock. Can’t see many people putting up with this shit. Then again, did your grandmother get many visitors?’

‘No,’ he answered, as with great care he inverted himself so that the force of gravity was acting in the direction of his feet, not his head. ‘Just Memphis, and even then not very often.’

‘Take it one rung at a time, and don’t look down any more than you have to.’

‘We’ll never get Hector back up this shaft if he’s hurt.’

‘Comes to that, we’ll call for help from the
Quaynor
. They can lower us a rope, or use the ship’s thrusters to take some of the spin off the habitat.’

‘Anyone would think you’d done this a million times.’

‘It’s all just breaking and entering.’ He could imagine Jumai grinning. ‘Used to delude myself that there was something in my brain, some developmental flaw which might mean I was predisposed to criminality. Wouldn’t that be glamorous? But I was wrong. The scans came back and I’m . . . almost tediously normal. Not a single brain module out of place or underdeveloped. I just happen to be more than averagely competent at breaking into things.’

Geoffrey forced a smile of his own. He might not have dragged Jumai out of Lagos – she’d quit of her own accord – but he couldn’t deny that there had been a large measure of self-interest. However it had worked out, it was good to have her back in his life.

By turns, and his vertigo notwithstanding, he found a steady descending rhythm, always ensuring that he had three points of contact with the wall. The suit might well protect him in the event of a fall, but he had no desire to put that to the test.

When at last they reached the ‘floor’, they’d come – by the suit’s estimation – a total of seventy-five vertical metres. Ambient gravity was now one gee, or as close as made no difference, and since the Winter Palace was only a little wider than one hundred and fifty metres across, they must be very close to the interior surface of its insulating skin. In the restricted space at the base of the shaft, Geoffrey could do little more than walk a few paces in either direction before he reached an obstructing wall or door. The gravity felt convincing enough in terms of the effort required and the load on his joints, but his inner ear insisted that something wasn’t quite right.

Jumai was already tackling the door that was their only point of ingress into the rest of the habitat. It looked similar to the one they’d already come through, but when more than a few minutes had elapsed without her managing to open it, Geoffrey guessed that this door presented additional challenges.

‘You think there’s something bad on the other side?’ he asked, hardly daring to break her concentration but not able to stop himself.

‘There’s pressure,’ she said quietly. ‘And unless these telltales are lying, it’s not nerve gas or a wall of fire. That’s not the problem, I’m afraid.’

‘So what is?’

‘Door’s interlocked with the one back up the shaft. Give me a day, and more equipment than we came with, and I might be able to bypass that interlocking mechanism. But right now, and with this equipment, I won’t be able to get us through this one without closing the other.’

‘And thereby cutting off contact with the
Quaynor.
’

‘Give the man a cigar.’

Geoffrey thought about this before answering. He didn’t like it, and he doubted Jumai liked it either, but they had come a long way to turn back now. ‘Have you ever been in a situation similar to this, in Lagos, or anywhere else you did contract work?’

‘Crazy question if you were asking anyone else, but . . . yes. Once or twice. Some of those server farms were designed by seriously paranoid arseholes.’

‘And you still went through.’

‘Had a job to do.’

‘So your judgement was correct, in the moment. You made a decision . . . and it paid off.’

‘Wouldn’t be having this conversation otherwise. I mean, I’m not saying I’d be dead, exactly, but sure as hell I wouldn’t still be in this line of work.’

‘In which case . . . I think you should open that door.’

Jumai’s hand was poised over the flip-out keypad on her sleeve forearm. ‘Let’s be clear about one thing, rich boy. No guarantees about what we’ll find on the other side, or how the door mechanism will look to me then. Might not be as easy to retrace as it was to come this far.’

‘Whatever it takes.’

After they had spoken to the
Quaynor
, Jumai said, ‘You grown balls of steel all of a sudden?’

‘Guess it’s just dawning on me – I’ve burnt too many bridges to start having second thoughts now.’ He knuckled his fist against the chest plate of the suit. ‘Fuck it all. I’m Geoffrey Akinya. This is my grandmother’s house. And I have every damned right to see what’s inside it.’

‘Hell, yeah,’ Jumai said.

And tapped the keypad.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Jonathan Beza whipped the blanket free with a magicianly flourish, beaming at Sunday as if this was a moment he had been planning for years.

The blanket had concealed a box. It was, superficially, much like the box that Gribelin’s proxy had unearthed the day before: the same dimensions, the same grey alloy casing. It looked older, though. Sunday couldn’t put her finger on exactly why that should be so, but she knew she was looking at something that had been locked and buried a long time ago. The dents and scratches had provenance.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘Eunice came back for my funeral,’ Jonathan said. ‘This we know. But she didn’t just come back for that. I . . . followed her.’ He hesitated, looking aside as if there was shame in what he had done. ‘At a distance, obviously, and I don’t think she ever suspected anything. It wasn’t difficult to track her movements, and there was no Evolvarium then. I traced her return to her old landing site, near Pavonis Mons – the burial spot.’

‘You saw her bury the box?’ Sunday asked.

He shook his head firmly. ‘No – I couldn’t get that close, not without making my presence known. But when she’d gone, there was nothing to stop me returning to the landing site. I gave it a year or two, just to let the dust settle. Part of me worried that the whole thing was a trap to flush me out.’

‘But it wasn’t.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘As much as it pains me, I think I was the last thing on her mind by then. Even my funeral . . . it suited her to come back to attend it, but maybe she already had other plans . . .’ He trailed off. ‘Perhaps you’d better open the box.’

‘Do you know what’s in it?’ Jitendra asked.

‘Yes, and it’s perfectly safe. But it won’t talk to me.’

As Sunday worked the catches at the side of the box, she said, ‘I still don’t get it. The box Dorcas stole – where did that one come from?’

‘Oh, that,’ Jonathan said, as if this was a detail he had nearly allowed to slip his mind. ‘I put that there, obviously. I knew that the real box was meant for someone to find, someone connected to the family. For sixty years, no one came. Then Eunice’s death was announced, and less than four months later her granddaughter shows up on Mars.’ He touched his fingers to his chin, as if mulling a difficult problem. ‘Hm. I wonder if those two things might possibly be connected?’

‘I was keeping an eye on things for him,’ Soya said. ‘When it became clear that you intended to enter the Evolvarium, there was no doubt that you’d come for the box.’

‘While Soya was meeting you in Crommelin,’ Jonathan said, ‘I was out there burying the decoy box. No one saw me do it. With the machines sniffing around, it wouldn’t stand a chance of going undetected for more than a few weeks. But we didn’t need that long, just the few days it would take you to cross Mars and reach the burial site.’

‘It was good that I warned you that the Pans couldn’t necessarily be trusted,’ Soya said. ‘It meant that you understood the situation the moment Dorcas turned on you. From what we can gather, you played your parts very well indeed. Dorcas never had the slightest idea that she’d been duped.’

‘She got the wrong box,’ Jitendra said, marvellingly.

‘And left you to the mercy of the Evolvarium,’ Soya added. ‘She cut a lot of deals to make that snatch. Frankly, no one will be shedding any tears if the other Overfloaters rip the
Lady Disdain
to shreds.’

Sunday had finally succeeded in opening the catches. She eased back the lid, the hinges stiff but manageable. She wasn’t sure what to expect this time. There had been a smaller box inside the decoy, but perhaps the point of that had just been to delay the Overfloaters. Inside this box she found a dense matrix of foam packing, and a rounded object poking through the top of the packing.

‘Take it out,’ Jonathan said. ‘It won’t bite.’

She understood the significance of his comment as she withdrew the ancient space helmet from the box. Even in Martian gravity it was heavy in her hands: like something forged from iron or cut from solid marble. She had never handled a helmet quite so antiquated.

But she had seen it before.

Vivid paintwork covered the helmet: slashes of yellow, gold and black, daubs of white and red around the visor’s rim. The paintwork had chipped to reveal bare metal in places, was scuffed and dirty elsewhere, but the design was still clear. It was a fierce blue-eyed lioness, her mouth gaping wide around the faceplate.

‘Senge Dongma,’ Sunday said, in reverence and awe. ‘The lion-faced one. This is Eunice’s actual helmet.’

‘Knew you’d recognise it,’ Jonathan said.

Sunday bit back the admission that she would have recognised nothing were it not for the construct. ‘I . . . saw an image of it on Phobos,’ she said. ‘Very recently. Was this really hers?’

‘This is what she buried. It’s been in my care ever since.’

She turned the helmet around in her hands, wheeling it like a globe, cradling history between her fingertips. In forced exile from her own family, Sunday had handled remarkably few artefacts with a direct link to her grandmother. This helmet, had it been back in the household museum, would have been one of the most hallowed relics.

‘This is all there was?’ she asked. ‘Nothing else with it?’

‘Were you expecting more?’ Jonathan responded.

‘It
is
just a helmet. The other things we’ve found pointed to something – another burial. This doesn’t.’

‘You’re sure of that?’ he asked.

‘It doesn’t take me any further than Mars. I know she had this helmet when she was on Phobos, so she would have brought it down to Mars when the dust storm cleared. But we’re on Mars already. It’s a dead end.’

‘Unless you’re missing something,’ Jonathan said.

‘It’s not just a helmet,’ Jitendra said, ‘is it? I mean, it
is
a helmet, but that doesn’t mean it’s just a lump of metal and plastic. There’s computing power inside it. It will have seen and recorded things, while she was using it.’

She looked at Jonathan. ‘Have you investigated that?’

‘The helmet is old,’ Jonathan said, ‘but from a mechanical standpoint there’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t have an internal power supply of its own, though. It will only work when it’s connected to a suit, via a compatible neck ring.’

‘Tell her,’ Soya said.

Jonathan shot his daughter a tolerant smile. ‘The suit could be anywhere, if it still exists. Eunice only left the helmet here, at this particular burial site. But it doesn’t have to be the same suit to make the helmet work. It just has to fit.’

‘You’d still have to find an old suit,’ Jitendra said.

‘That’s what antiques markets are for,’ Soya said, with a glimmer of pride. ‘It took me a long, long time, but I found one in the end, not far from Lowell. Not as old as the helmet, only about seventy years, but with the same coupling.’ She whisked aside one of the room’s curtains, revealing an old-fashioned composite shell spacesuit, olive drab and grey, with evidence of damage and repair all over it. The suit was complete from the neck ring down, hanging from a rack that had been bolted to the metal innards of the Aggregate. ‘It’s a piece of shit,’ Soya explained. ‘You’d trust your life to this thing only if it was the absolute last resort. But it can still juice the helmet.’

Sunday asked the obvious question. ‘Have either of you tried it on?’

‘Both of us,’ Jonathan answered. ‘Some kind of low-level sphinxware running inside it. Beyond a few gatekeeper questions, it won’t talk to either of us. But it might work for you.’

There was no part of getting into that musty old suit that Sunday could be said to have enjoyed. The suit was a poor fit in all the critical places (it felt as if it had been tailored for a portly child, not a woman) and being seventy years old, it did nothing to assist in the process of being worn. Without the complicity of Jitendra, Jonathan and Soya, she doubted she would have been able to put the hideous old thing on at all. Conversely, without them there, she probably wouldn’t have had the nerve to keep trying. Each component of the suit, as it clicked into place, added to her sense of imprisonment and paralysis.

The suit was not functioning, in any accepted sense of the word. Its motive power-assist was dead, so it required all of Sunday’s strength and determination to move it even slightly. The best she could manage was a ghoulish, mummylike shuffle, and the effort of that would soon tax her to exhaustion. Not that she could go very far anyway. Its cooling and air-recirculation systems were only barely operative, so it was as hot and stuffy as the inside of a sleeping bag. It had no independent internal power supply, but needed to be connected to the Aggregate by an energy umbilical. Only then could the suit feed power to the helmet, which had to be locked into place before it would boot-up and function. Sunday felt ready to be buried. The air circulator huffed and wheezed like an asthmatic dog. Caution indicators, blocked in red, were already illuminating the faceplate head-up display. Even before it had fully booted, the helmet knew that it was plugged into a piece of barely safe garbage, and it wasn’t too happy about it.