Igor’s rocket provided them with enough thrust to accelerate constantly at less than a thousandth of a g. This had always seemed a small amount to Eliot, but it nevertheless meant that their speed was increasing all the time. It had taken them seven weeks to fly by Mars but, at the rate they were travelling, they were scheduled to reach Saturn in just over a year, even though it was much further away.
Terra-Two was three lightyears away, a figure that made interplanetary distances seem relatively measly. Eliot knew that, at their current acceleration, it would take the crew 150 years to reach Terra-Two, but Igor and his team had engineered the ship’s engine to swing by Saturn like a ribbon around a maypole, using the planet’s gravity to increase their speed by a factor of 100, enough to catapult the Damocles from their solar system and into interstellar space.
As the red planet loomed large in the window, Eliot began to wonder what it had been like for Commander Sheppard, Cai and Igor, who had served multiple missions on Mars. Eliot didn’t find it difficult to imagine Igor weathering a dust storm, his pellucid blue eyes shining behind his visor as he endured another season of sunless polar nights.
‘Do you think we’ll be able to see the hab-labs from here?’ Astrid asked when she entered the kitchen and joined Eliot by the window. The air was bitter with the smell of coffee – Juno was behind them, scooping the black sludge of brewed grounds into the disposal unit.
‘Do you think we can see the what?’ Poppy asked, dusting crumbs off her overalls.
‘Not from here,’ Juno said. ‘With a telescope maybe.’ Mars was the size of a copper penny.
‘Do you ever wonder what it’s like down there?’ Eliot asked. Juno shook her head.
‘Like a desert,’ said Poppy. ‘That’s what Commander Sheppard says.’
‘Like a cold desert,’ said Juno. ‘Just you wait until we get to Jupiter. We’ll actually get close to it.’
Eliot could not help but smile as he imagined watching the gas giant from the window of the crew module. A late but exciting addition to their mission involved helping to deliver supplies to the US station orbiting above one of Jupiter’s moons. Eliot was looking forward to meeting up with the seasoned astronauts on station, but he was still curious about the surface of Mars. If he squinted he thought he could see it, pock-marked and terracotta. The dusting of ice at the poles – larger on the top than the bottom – suggested that it was winter, now, in the southern hemisphere.
‘Hey.’ Astrid turned to Eliot, rousing him from his reverie. ‘Igor says he has something to show you. On the engineering deck.’
Eliot’s ears pricked up with curiosity. ‘Really?’ he asked. ‘What?’
Astrid beamed. ‘Terra-Two,’ she said, and then rushed out of the room. Eliot hurried after her and down the ladder that led to the engineering deck.
In Eliot’s capacity as trainee engineer, he spent a lot of time with Igor on the windowless engineering deck, and it had quickly become one of his favourite places on the Damocles. When he walked, he could feel the ship’s heartbeat through the soles of his feet. What little light there was on the engineering deck came from the scrolling readouts off the monitors and the orange glow of hot filaments.
The deck reminded Eliot of his uncle’s studio. After his parents’ death, he had been sent to live with his father’s brother, a perilously thin autistic man who worked for a watchmaker in south Wales and let Eliot spend long hours in the studio with him as he built timepieces. Eliot traced his interest in engineering back to those days of flipping through user manuals, jiggling his leg on the rungs of a stool while CNC cutters buzzed in the background. He’d come to admire the machinery, the reliability of it, as he leaned over the desk as his uncle polished tiny cogs and screws. There was something impressive about the fine micro-mechanics of a wristwatch, small things, some no bigger than a two-pound coin, and yet inside was an entire whirring solar system built of golden shafts, steel springs and gearwheels. Each watch contained over 1,000 components, some barely visible to the naked eye.
That was how Eliot began with robotics. He turned his bedroom into a workshop, collecting what equipment he could from his uncle’s studio and, in the dead of night, building machines straight from his dreams. A robotic finger that could twang the strings of a guitar, a hand that high-fived; then more complex machines: a sunlight sensor attached to the railing on his curtains, so they flew open when the radius of the sun at the horizon was exactly sixteen arc minutes. He designed a head for a Terran rover that performed calculations – based on the viability of water, and the partial pressure of various gasses – and yielded the probability of finding life in that region. He’d called the programme the Liston Algorithm.
His uncle had been so impressed by it that he entered the work into an engineering competition run by Imperial College London. Eliot did not understand the exact chain of circumstances that led to his work landing on the desk of Igor Bovarin, but he still remembered the day that the legendary cosmonaut had called him up on the house phone. A week later, four men in suits arrived at the house and sat in the living room, which Eliot clearly remembered was flooded with white afternoon light, gulls arcing and wheeling through the window.
‘So, you’re Eliot Liston,’ they’d said. ‘How old are you?’
‘Six hundred and sixty-seven,’ Eliot had said. ‘Weeks. Twelve point eight years. Almost… thirteen.’ A low whistle of surprise from one of the men.
They could not believe that the work had come from someone so young. Surely, they appealed to his uncle, he’d had some help. At least with the more complicated calculations? But his uncle had insisted he’d done it alone. Then, Igor Bovarin, the man – the legend – at the far end of the room, brought out a pen and wrote an equation on a piece of paper. Handed it to Eliot. Eliot had solved it quickly with a little laugh. Another, harder this time. Then another, in a tense back and forth exchange that ended, forty minutes later, in applause from three of the men.
They told him then about Dalton. A school on the outskirts of London where he could meet other students like himself. Had he heard of it? Of course he had! They told him about the work he could do there, the freedom he would have on the engineering stream to work with others as brilliant as himself, to be properly challenged by the best professors in the world. And, most enticing of all, if he agreed to go, his machines would be built. ‘Even the wild ones?’ he asked. Even the code he’d already written with a basic harmonic theory for a robot that could improvise a guitar solo.
‘Eliot, those are the most important ones,’ Igor had said with a smile.
There were already supply vessels heading for Terra-Two with the pre-fabricated hab-labs and equipment. But, they’d told him, once they made landfall they would need a mind like his not only to repair and update the machines, but to invent new ones. Machines that could meet the environmental challenges they were bound to face, that could drill into the land for water, that could drive for months, collect data and broadcast back the coordinates of optimal settlement locations.
They bought the patent to the Liston Algorithm and told him to pack his things. Two weeks later he was at Dalton, working under Igor on the engineering stream. Years later, he was on a ship bound for Terra-Two.
Chapter 19