‘So how is it planning to land us?’
‘We will soon find out . . .’
The attitude thrusters banged. The craft lurched, down and sideways, throwing the passengers around in their couches. Jiang squeezed Penny’s hand harder. She glimpsed the landscape of the moon fleeing past her window, crater rims, a sharp, close-by horizon. Then it was as if something grabbed at the shuttle – silently, smoothly, with no crude mechanical coupling, but the craft was held firm. And the deceleration was sudden, fierce, face forward, so she was thrust into her harness. Still there was barely any noise, only the high-pitched whine of fans, the passengers’ ragged breathing. The deceleration, the pressure of the harness on her chest, went on and on.
‘The sling,’ Jiang said now, through a grimace of discomfort.
‘The what?’
‘A mass driver. A launch rail, wrapped around the curve of this world, like Ceres. We have come skimming down from our transfer orbit to touch it, almost. It has grabbed us with its magnetic field. The sling is slowing us down, the reverse of the way it is generally used to hurl payloads from a standing start off into space.’
‘A hell of a way to land a crewed spacecraft.’
Jiang shrugged. ‘It is not routinely used, but there have been piloted trials to test the technique. It is only a question of orbital geometry.’
‘To an AI, maybe.’
‘The only reason it is not used more often is because it defies human instinct.’
‘I’ll say. If anything went wrong—’
‘It would not, it could not—’
‘Stop arguing,’ Earthshine said now. The shuttle was sliding to rest, the deceleration easing. ‘It doesn’t matter any more. We’re down. Now we have to face what comes next.’ He pointed out of a port.
Penny looked, and saw a hulk, a kernel-drive craft, a tall, fat cylinder standing on squat legs on the lunar surface. The craft stood on a smooth, hardened apron, a rough disc with ragged edges. Fuel pipes trailed up to sockets on the body of the ship, and fat-wheeled supply trucks rolled by. The sun was low, off to the left – she had no idea if it was lunar morning or evening in this place – and the rocket cast a long shadow. It was like some pre-Apollo dream of space flight, a crude rocketship.
The ferry at last slid to a halt. Penny heard mechanical clamps clatter closed, to pin the hull safely in place on the sling rail.
The passengers immediately began to unbuckle. A bus raced across the lunar surface towards them, throwing up rooster tails of dust. Penny stood up, her head swimming in the low lunar gravity. There was no time to think. Earthshine was right. She just had to put the scary trauma of the landing out of her head, and face whatever came next.
Earthshine flickered, looked up at Penny with a wistful smile, then imploded in a shower of evanescent, evaporating pixels. Shut down for the transfer, she guessed.
There was a bang on the hull, and the hatch slid open, to reveal a short tunnel to the bus. An ISF officer, a young woman, stood in the door. ‘Come. Please.’ Once they were aboard the bus, the ISF woman urged them to sit down and strap in.
The bus detached quickly and rolled away across the lunar surface, making some speed. The bus was insubstantial, little more than a blister of some transparent substance over a low cart with a couple of rows of seats, and when its wheels hit one of the shallow craters that littered the lunar ground, it floated up off the surface like a toy. Grimly Penny clung to a rail on the back of the seat in front of her. She wondered if this fragile little vehicle was meant for taking tourists around Tranquillity or one of the other museum sites.
But they were making fast progress, heading straight for the base of that kernel-powered rocketship. Penny saw a truck offloading white cargo boxes in protective pallets for transfer to the ship, the essence of Earthshine being transferred to his interplanetary chariot, perhaps. The whole operation had a scary air of improvisation.
‘I don’t recognise this place,’ she said to Jiang. ‘And I thought I knew the moon. I worked here long enough.’
‘All of this has been assembled quickly, and largely in secret. Even the kernel ship’s landing pad.’ He grinned at her. ‘Can you guess how the pad was made?’
She looked again at the disc of ground on which the ship stood. ‘It looks like a sheet of basalt . . . oh.’
‘Yes. The ship made it itself. I have seen images of it; General McGregor, who is our pilot, had the ship hover over the lunar ground.’
McGregor? That name was familiar. ‘And the downwash of the kernel-physics jets melted the dust.’
‘That’s the idea. We live in a remarkable time, Penny, when such stunts are possible. Adventure-story stuff.’
She was less impressed; the whole thing struck her as showing off.
She was distracted by a ripple of light in the sky. A Chinese junk, it had to be. Once in space the hulk ship would be able to outpace any such craft, but it was vulnerable while on the ground; a rock thrown down at interplanetary speeds would split that squat hull like an eggshell. ‘We might only have minutes,’ she murmured.
‘I know,’ Jiang said. ‘Everything is under control.’
She thought he deserved a sceptical glance for that.
The bus skidded sideways and fairly threw itself at a docking port in the base of the hull, meeting it with millimetre-scale precision. More scary unhesitating AI navigation.
Beyond the port was a small chamber, brightly lit, with what looked like a door to an elevator shaft beyond. Within, two people were waiting for them, a male ISF officer, and a civilian woman – and to her surprise Penny recognised them both.
The woman, in her late thirties, slim, dark, lost-looking, was Beth Eden Jones: a human native of a different star system, returned to Sol by a trick of alien technology. One of the most famous faces in the solar system, probably, unmistakable with that barbaric tattoo, and staring back at Penny. Beth snapped, ‘What? I just got here too. What are you staring at?’
Penny flinched. ‘Sorry. It’s just – I know you. I’m Colonel Penelope Kalinski, ISF.’ She held out a hand, which wasn’t taken. ‘You met my sister on Mercury when—’
‘I don’t care.’ She turned to the man beside her. ‘How do I get off this thing?’
Taller, with a spectacular shock of silver-grey hair, in his seventies perhaps, the ISF man looked down at her with a kind of exasperated weariness. ‘You don’t, I’m afraid. None of us do. As ought to have been explained to you. All aboard? Close that hatch.’ Automated systems responded.
As soon as the chamber was sealed up Earthshine flickered into existence, blinking, solidifying, clarifying in a whir of pixels. He looked down at his hand, flexed it, touched his face. ‘I have successfully interfaced with the ship’s systems, it seems. That was quick.’
‘We are the ISF, sir,’ said the officer. He bowed, which was the correct protocol with virtual representations, and Earthshine bowed back. ‘Welcome aboard the good ship Tatania. I’m General Lex McGregor, ISF; I’m to be your pilot. We have a small crew whom you’ll meet in due course. Now we must get on. If you’ll accompany me to the bridge . . .’
The door behind him slid open to reveal an elevator cage, and they crowded in. Soon they were riding up the axis of the craft. Earthshine lost no definition inside the elevator, no protocol-violation flinches, no blurring of pixels. Good interfacing indeed, Penny thought.
McGregor grinned at her, handsome despite his age. ‘So. Kalinski.’
‘Lex. Good to see you again.’
‘I’ve followed your career with interest all these years. And your sister. Nobody who flies a kernel ship can be unaware of the papers published under the Kalinski names, jointly or otherwise.’
‘Depends which reality stream you’re talking about.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Never mind.’ She said to the others, ‘The General and I go back a long way, to Mercury. My sister and I were about eleven years old, and my father was preparing to launch his Angelia probe to Alpha. And you—’