21

‘Can you see it yet?’

‘Not yet, damn it …’

Jeorg North was in the nominal pilot’s seat in the Aquila’s cramped bridge. Indeed he was nominal ship’s commander, given that the crew of this adapted Earth-Moon ferry numbered just two, for this stretch mission to Saturn.

His only companion was Doria Bohm, herself a leader of a diffuse rebel faction on the Moon.

Few of the Lunar Consortium’s ruling elite, such as it was – even those who had strongly approved of the mission of the Aquila – had been overjoyed about this choice of crew. Especially since Jeorg, their pilot, a defector from Earth, had a connection by marriage to somebody who was actually slated to be on the Cronus when it was sent to Planet Nine.

That, Jeorg admitted, was a strong, if not the only, motive for his volunteering for this mission: to get back at his husband, Bheki Molewa. Bheki, who had jumped at the chance, when he was surprisingly offered it, of riding the Cronus to Saturn, and then on to Nine. Without a backward glance, it felt like, at his husband of a decade.

Their divorce had been done in a helium-3-fast flash.

Well, however Jeorg and Doria had got into this ship, it had been one heck of a ride so far. A rebel pilot from Earth and a rebel lunar – both highly motivated to do this, if for different reasons, and somehow they had gotten along during the six years of this mission, shadowing Cronus all the way …

But a glance through the various views of their target drove home to Jeorg that the journey wasn’t over yet.

‘If you want pretty views of Saturn, I’ve got them,’ he said. ‘But the elevator hub and all the stuff going on around it is a blur. Still too far out.’

‘We’re doing our best, Jeorg. And so is this beat-up bird of ours …’

She was right, of course.

The Aquila had been designed as a Moon to Earth-orbit cargo ferry, in essence – but with the capability to go further, the asteroids in particular in mind. Its acceleration was not much less than that of the Cronus – both based on the same uranium-fission technology – and it had been able, just, to match the much larger ship in making this long, slow, mostly unpowered transfer from Earth to Saturn. But still, it was a rattly bird, a floating coffin, compared to the roomy liner they were chasing, and Jeorg, despite long periods of cryosleep, was old enough for the rattling to be a pain, and to suffer at long confinement in such a small craft.

Doria, absently stroking the obsidian-disc pendant at her neck, looked over his shoulder at various consoles. ‘Still too far out – that’s not good enough. We don’t have a rendezvous solution yet. The predictive algorithms must be able to do better than that. I mean we know what we’re looking for. The Cronus, in a damn jig … It’s pretty hard to miss.’

‘Yeah. But what we need is a precise location, a precise prediction of when they’re going to launch the damn thing, so we know when to close in and be there, and for that we need detail. Ah, I’ve tried long enough. You take over if you think you can do better.’

Ill-tempered, scratchy, cooped up in this tiny ship, he loosened his harness and pushed out of the chair – but came out clumsily, scraping his leg. Feeling a little groggy too. That was the effect of the thrusters, he knew.

Doria laughed at his scrape. ‘We’ll make a spacer of you yet, Earth boy.’

But before Jeorg could dig out a suitable response – indeed one he hadn’t used before, after the years of the voyage – Doria held her hand up, staring into the monitors.

‘Actually I think I have something. Imagery’s getting a little sharper. Yes, I think it’s extrapolating a formation from what must be the jig frame lights, and the lamps on the ship itself, on Cronus. And—’

‘Just tell me …’

She hesitated. ‘Let me verify … We’ve found her. The Cronus.’

‘Shit.’

He copied over the image to his own monitor, examined it, magnified it.

‘There she is. In her jig. At last. We’re going in.’ He began to clear his board in preparation for a high thrust burst.

Doria said nervously, ‘And then they’ll know we’re here, won’t they? And where we are.’

‘Good,’ he snarled.

When the news of the intruder broke, several days after their arrival here, John Smith and Elizabeth Vasta were in the elevator hub, watching the final stages of assembly of their enhanced ship, after which would come her cautious backing out of the jig frame.

They both knew how close the Cronus was to launch – or relaunch, rather. In the final days and hours they had spent much time in the hub’s restrictive viewing lounges, watching as much as they could. A project, Smith thought, that sometimes looked like a high-tech artist’s caricature of a kicked-open ants’ nest.

But Smith knew that Elizabeth Vasta hadn’t much enjoyed watching the transformation – for aesthetic reasons.

She said now, ‘I take it you’ve actually seen what those engineers have done to that beautiful ship of ours.’ They’d both been given tours, mostly virtual, of the modified sections. ‘The gutting of it … ’

He smiled. ‘It does feel like ours after six years, doesn’t it? But with the right attitude, it can seem just as beautiful now …’

‘Oh. Here she comes.’

They both peered out. The slow withdrawal from the jig was cautiously, agonisingly slow.

And the ship emerging from the jig’s cocoon of struts and panels had indeed been radically transformed.

Smith clearly recalled its elegant dumbbell shape – the two big spheres, the long spine – all of it surrounded by a forest of sails, solar panels and waste-heat radiators. The forward sphere that had been their home for six years.

That had all changed.

As soon as the ship had been backed into its jig factory, the rear sphere, housing the fission engine and much of its uranium and methane fuel, had been detached and dismantled. The very anchorage at the end of the spine had been much changed.

And now onto that rebuilt anchorage had been attached a new engine entirely, based on a new, ultra-modern reactor burning helium-3 fuel. But the reactor itself, even the fuel tanks, all of it was difficult to see, dwarfed as it was by a huge new engine bell, that, unlike the old, modest fission engine nozzles, challenged the dimensions of the craft as a whole.

Smith pointed now. ‘Look at that. An engine nozzle the size of a cathedral.’

Vasta grinned. ‘I guess you’ve seen more cathedrals than I have. But that’s a good comparison, yes.’

‘Maybe this is our cathedral, our way to reach God, not through prayer, but by going out in a huge ship to the edge of the Solar System, and meeting Her?’

She winked at him. ‘Her? We in government keep all comparisons of the creature they call Feathers with gods or other supernatural beings strictly under wraps.’ She looked again out of the window, at the much-evolved ship in its cradle, the industrial movements around it. ‘All in just a month. Though I suppose you have to allow for the preparation time we never saw, before we got here.’

He smiled. ‘And now you can fly to the Oort cloud, and bring back Feathers to Earth – where, though? The world government chambers at Geneva? Like Pocahontas in London?’

‘Who?’

‘Or Saint Peter in Rome, if you want the religious connection … though that didn’t end well. Never mind.’

‘That’s the plan, roughly. That’s if the damn quasar doesn’t melt the Alps before we get home – or even melt us. Our ships, I mean.’

‘Have you heard yet who the captain is to be, by the way?’

She grinned. ‘Hadn’t you been told? Commander Caspar.’

‘Oh.’ He pondered that. ‘Commander of the elevator community itself? Should that surprise me?’

‘Well, he wanted the job, and nobody here outranks him, either in the elevator hub or aboard the Cronus. He’s made sure he’s been all over the works in progress on the ship itself – in fact I found, looking back, he was even heavily involved in the specification, scheduling and equipping of the operation since long before we got here. I’ve seen the paperwork. Maybe this has been a long-nurtured ambition.

‘He’s had no complaints from the crew of the Cronus, including the current captain – I suspect that she was told direct from Earth that she would be standing down in favour of Caspar, that she would be going no further. But it all still depends on us getting the Cronus refitted successfully and on time.’

Smith frowned. ‘What about Fabio? His son?’

She smiled. ‘Your chess partner? I’m not sure …’

That was when the alarm sounded. And Caspar’s own voice boomed over the links.

‘All hands. We’ve got a problem.’

They stared out of the windows.

And their screens flickered, and filled with images and data concerning a craft John Smith immediately recognised.

The situation became clear quickly.

Once the hub’s hazard monitors, checking for rogue ring-ice fragments, had picked up the signature of the Aquila – as soon as it came out of hiding and lit up its engine – the automatics had started to track the intruder’s trajectory.

And when it appeared actually to be on a collision course with the Cronus in its jig – or at least heading for a close pass – alarms blared.

Smith and Vasta downloaded all the data they could, trying to understand. And soon enough they found more, higher-resolution long-distance shots of the Aquila itself.

Vasta grunted. ‘It’s one thing knowing that this craft has dogged Cronus all the way from Earth. It’s quite another to see it.’

Smith nodded. ‘And it doesn’t help matters that the Aquila has no grace, none at all. That rough, blocky, cylindrical shape – it looks like a weapon to me, a missile, a crude club—or even a forearm with a clenched fist. And do you think they actually are implying some kind of threat?’

Vasta was rapidly following feeds: visual, audio, text. ‘Well, they’re saying nothing for now. The crew here take it that way, it seems. Emmanuel Caspar certainly will, I think. He’ll be preparing for the worst. I know the authorities have been working on this, even over my head—’

‘Pretty high up, then.’

She gave him a look.

‘I think there must have been attempts to resolve this situation long before it reached us, here. The governments, and President Mason herself, have long been fretting about the relationship with the Consortium. But they haven’t done anything.

‘When the Cronus mission design was published, the Lunar Consortium wanted in. Their demands seemed reasonable. At least to be able to provide witnesses, participants, even just as passengers. They even referred to bits of history. Precedents. The Apollo astronauts, first to the Moon, claimed to be going there on behalf of all humankind. Even if that itself was all a geopolitical stunt on many levels.’

‘So what’s their purpose now? This Consortium ship, chasing us across the Solar System—’

Vasta shrugged. ‘There is some intelligence – it says here – that they just want to have a presence in this mission. Here at the launch, if nowhere else. Just to show they have a right to be here.’

And is it plausible that that’s really all they want?

Smith hesitated, not sure if he should meddle. He was a Conserver; all these political tensions between Earth and Consortium had nothing to do with him. But this was a big moment; when else could you speak freely?

He said cautiously, ‘There is a way they can ensure they won’t be left behind by Cronus. Not if they can stop it flying.’

Vasta raised an eyebrow.

And Caspar, evidently juggling feeds, chimed in. ‘I heard that. Sorry, I feel the need to keep you online, Advisor Vasta. Mr Smith?’

Vasta called, ‘Commander? Can you project the Aquila’s trajectory?’

‘Sure …’

He hesitated. Taking a long breath, Smith imagined.

‘It’s actually a collision course now. Shit. I can’t believe … You think they might actually try to harm Cronus? I mean, the possible consequences – not just the political – the physical harm could be immense. You’re talking about two nuclear engines here, coming together …’

Smith thought fast and hard. Don’t make it worse, John. ‘We need to find a way to stand all this down. Look – it seems evident that the Consortium want a stake in this project.’

Vasta looked at him. ‘That’s obvious. So what are you suggesting?’

Smith shrugged. ‘Give them what they want. Even now. It only need be a token. Maybe even get one of their own, one of the crew of this Aquila, onto the Cronus. We have time to resolve this. Umm, I see from the readouts that the Aquila will be here in hours, collision course or not.’

Vasta said stiffly, ‘A presence on the Cronus. That may be politically awkward at this point.’

Smith pressed, ‘You could make a case for welcoming them, scientific, diplomatic. The Consortium does represent a new branch of human society – just as I do, I guess. I’ll be aboard, representing my own faction—’

Vasta shook her head. ‘You Conservers live out in the Oort cloud under huge solar sails. You do not dig fission fuel and such out of the face of the Moon; you are not in a position to throw a city-killer chunk of Moon rock at the Earth at a few days’ notice.’

He smiled. ‘I’m not sure if I should feel flattered by that, or not. But isn’t that all the more reason to reach out to the lunars? Even at this late stage—’

She waved a hand. ‘Maybe. I’m glad it’s not my decision to make …’

‘But maybe it is,’ Caspar snapped. ‘Or mine anyhow. Given the lightspeed delays to comms with Earth. If things happen too quickly, we’re on the spot … I need to deal with this. And I may need your backing, Advisor Vasta.’

‘You’ll have it.’ And, distracted, Vasta turned to peer into another of the monitors.

Looking over her shoulder, Smith saw another angle on the Cronus – with the Sun’s low illumination heavily enhanced, and a number of guide lights on the jig structure and the ship itself shining bright.

He had the feeling something had changed. He bent, trying to see. ‘Elizabeth – I thought I saw something …’

Vasta had leaned away, looking into the distance. Thinking. ‘Maybe you’re right, John. Maybe we can make this work. If the Aquila can get here before we launch the Cronus out towards Nine in three days’ time … I imagine we’ll handle the diplomacy, the clumsiness of the move. We’re all a long way from home.’

Caspar grunted. ‘We’ll give them a good viewing position for the launch. And beer. Consortium types always like beer. But they are not getting a berth on my mission— not after this – ah. Wait, please.’

His image disappeared.

‘Elizabeth.’ John didn’t take his eyes off his own screen. Tried not to blink, to verify that the small motions he was perceiving were real. ‘Look at this.

‘I think the Cronus is coming out of the jig.’

Vasta snorted. ‘Can’t be. That’s days away, by the published schedule. If it is moving it ought to be obvious …’

But Smith leaned forward. ‘And so it is, now I see it.’

‘Shit.’ She pressed a button. ‘Commander Caspar? Paging Commander Caspar. This is Elizabeth Vasta, Please respond …’

Another screen lit up with Caspar’s face.

Where Caspar had seemed angry before, now he looked – excited. Smith thought. Energised. Pleased with himself.

‘Elizabeth? I can guess why you’re calling. I should have told you, but … We accelerated the schedule. We’ve been working towards this for weeks – after all, there wasn’t much to finish up, and it wasn’t hard to lose a few days in the final test plans. It was a snap decision, and you can see we’re moving already—’

‘Hmm. I’m not sure the quality review panels are going to be so sanguine.’

‘Orders from the top, actually, Elizabeth. Authorised by the President, ultimately. So I was told.’

‘I wasn’t—’

‘Standing orders, in case the Consortium or any other malefactor tried to meddle with the mission. We get the ship out of there and to safety. Well, this is one hell of a meddle.’

‘Damn it,’ Elizabeth snapped. ‘Why wasn’t I consulted about this?’

‘Because of the time lags, I’m in operational command,’ he said, speaking quickly now.

John Smith was following all this, but slowly. ‘Oh. So to avoid any chance of the Consortium people impeding the mission, in the middle of this chaotic situation, you’re actually going to try to launch ahead of schedule—’

‘Ahead of the public schedule, yes.’

‘So you can get out of here before the Aquila even arrives? All to make sure the Consortium stays shut out?’

‘It’s not much of a plan, but it’s all I’ve got. It should work. If we can get away now, they won’t have the delta-V for a catch-up manoeuvre. You know how underpowered their little fission ships are.’

John put in, ‘I don’t know anything about that. But I know what hubris is, Commander. Talking this out may be a better option that some dangerous physical stunt.’

‘Well, my team made the recommendation, and I accepted it. Advisor Vasta, again I hope you will back this as in the spirit of my orders, secret and otherwise. Look, to practical matters. Even with the accelerated schedule it’s still days until the launch proper – until engine start. From that point the schedule will proceed as before. All we’ve cut is the final prep time. Get the Cronus out of there quicker. The immediate implication for you two is that you need to be ready to transfer to the Cronus today.’

Vasta threw her hands in the air. ‘Have you any idea how many meetings I’ll have to cancel to achieve that? … OK, Commander. I do, officially, think this is crazy, by the way. You have my authorisation. I trust you.’

Possibly mistakenly, Smith thought, but didn’t say so out loud.

‘Prepare for departure …’

On the Aquila, leaked voice comms and a few images had by now made the hub commander’s strategy all too clear.

Jeorg tried to keep a lid on his anger. He wondered if his ex, Bheki, was at the controls of Cronus right now.

‘The bastards,’ said Doria. ‘They’re moving out. They tricked us over the timing.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘You think they planned this from the start?’

‘Maybe. They didn’t see us coming, but they must have had an early launch baked into the schedule as a contingency right from the off. Maybe in case of some other disaster, some natural horror show …’

‘Damn.’

Doria was monitoring message chatter, he saw.

She said now, ‘You know, there is a lot of complaining going on out there. At Saturn, I mean, at the elevator hub. About the early launch – not so much the commanders, but lower down, some of the engineers, the logistics people, even some of the passengers. It could be that we surprised them after all. They thought we couldn’t get here, even late in their planning. Yet here we are. They’re all having to rush to get ready before we close in, which isn’t healthy, in terms of engineering integrity. Oh – and there are some who actually think we should be given a chance.’ She looked at him. ‘A place on the ship. That’s my reading. We can download all this to the Moon and get a proper analysis. If the Moon can talk to the Earth councils—’

‘Too slow,’ Jeorg said. ‘I mean, yes, let’s do that, but you’re looking at an hour each way to send a message at lightspeed. And the sooner we make a decision about what the hell we do, the better. I mean in terms of changing our trajectory.’

They looked at each other. They both knew that the earlier such a change was made, the less fuel it would require, and the more options they had.

She seemed worried.

Well she might be, Jeorg thought.

‘So,’ she said, ‘what are you saying?’

‘What I’m saying is that we have to do something right now.’ He grinned, which he knew was a brutal expression. ‘We came out here to make a rendezvous with Cronus. Well, let’s make it.

‘Prepare for manoeuvres.’