So they gave Falcon a ship. Hope Dhoni helped him board.
The ship was essentially a dumb-bell: cylindrical spine with fusion engines and landing gear at one end, a spherical crew capsule at the other. In fact, it was similar to the venerable Discovery class of interplanetary craft that had first taken Falcon to Jupiter more than three decades ago, though on a smaller scale. The basic engineering logic, that you needed to separate your fusion-powered, radiation-leaking engine module from your habitable compartments, had not changed.
However, everything not absolutely essential for Falcon’s voyage had been stripped away, making the craft lean and fast. Once aboard, Falcon was tucked in tighter than a Mercury astronaut in his primitive capsule—and that was a reflection Geoff Webster would have liked. Falcon had no need of independent life-support systems, and he would spend most of the trip out to the Kuiper Belt in induced sleep, so he needed little room.
They had given the craft no name, leaving that to Falcon. He searched his memory, thinking of Webster. What of that dreamy day when the two of them had gone ballooning across the northern plains of India? Falcon’s not-so-subtle objective had been to persuade Webster of the joys of lighter-than-air flight, and so gain his support in Falcon’s schemes. Without that trip, there would have been no Queen Elizabeth, no Kon-Tiki, no encounter with the medusa . . . It was bittersweet, yes. But so much had flowed from that one trip.
“Srinagar,” Falcon said.
“I’m sorry?” Hope said. She was leaning over him, into the cabin, with a medical-diagnostics minisec in her hand. She was here to finalise his integration into the ship.
“My call sign. Srinagar. Will you pass it on?”
Hope said nothing, and continued to work. She seemed reluctant to leave. Indeed, he was fairly certain that Hope had been wishing for something to crop up, some justification for her blocking his involvement in the Kuiper Belt mission.
“I’ll be all right, you know,” he said, when she finally backed out and the techs prepared to seal him away.
Hope unplugged the last of her diagnostic feeds; it whipped back into the body of the minisec. “Well, I hope you look after yourself out there.”
He studied her; she sounded as if she’d been rebuffed. “Hope—”
“Yes?”
He rested his artificial hand on hers. “I’ll be fine. I meant what I said in that meeting, you know. I don’t have too many friends. But the ones I have, I value.”
* * * *
He lifted from Makemake at one gee, exceeding escape velocity within a hundred seconds, with Trujillo’s little puddle of light and warmth soon falling behind. Within another minute or two, the curvature of Makemake had brought the lights of Brown Station into view. But soon the whole of the little world was in his field of view and already dropping back.
In free space Falcon increased fusion power by one gee increments, keeping a careful eye on the instruments, until he was satisfied that Srinagar was handling smoothly. He would burn at ten gees for three hours, bringing his speed to a thousand kilometres per second. It sounded fast, and indeed it was: at such a speed, he could travel between the Earth and the Moon in a matter of minutes. But the scale of the outer solar system was much vaster than the mere baby step between the Earth and the Moon. Even at this speed the trip from Earth out to Makemake would take more than two months—as indeed it must have done for the World Government delegates. And although Makemake orbited within the Kuiper Belt, just as did the target iceteroid, the hop would take Falcon across a broad swathe of that huge, sprawling swarm of iceteroids. He would restart the fusor no earlier than twenty-five days from now, and for most of that time he would simply cruise, unpowered.
And asleep.
“Makemake, Srinagar. This is Falcon. I’m signing off—I expect to wake in about six hundred hours. Tell Doctor Dhoni her patient is taking excellent care of himself.”
Falcon cast one final glance back at Makemake, backlit by the sun. It occurred to him that all the worlds on which people had ever walked now lay in his line of sight, snug in their warm and cosy orbits; for an instant he felt the ancient and familiar unease of travellers across the ages, as their courses took them into the unknown. But the moment passed, and Falcon readied himself for sleep. He dreamed briefly of ballooning over the sunlit Himalayas with Geoff Webster and Hope Dhoni—with an irritated simp in the rigging, threatening to sabotage the heater . . .
And then there were no dreams at all.