Well, Sevgi parenthesised to herself, not if you luck out and get a friendly orbital configuration anyway. But we don’t like to talk about that, guys. That’s what we in the trade like to call a Quiet Fact. Sort of thing even accredited COLIN staff won’t necessarily have pointed out to them. Sort of thing you might have to dig a little for.
But, as Horkan’s Pride fell silently, implacably homeward, Sevgi had done that digging. Detective Ertekin has a sound analytical approach to casework, her first year homicide report had come back one time, and shows energy and enthusiasm in absorbing fresh background detail. She has a talent for adjusting rapidly to new circumstances. She did her homework, they were trying to say, and here, nearly a decade later in the heart of COLIN, she did it again. Did her homework and found that the distance between Earth and Mars could vary by up to a factor of six. Mars, it seemed, orbited elliptically, and that plus the different orbital velocities of the two planets meant that they could be anything between about sixty and about four hundred million kilometres apart, depending on when you chose to span the gap. Even oppositions – Mars and Earth catching each other up, running temporarily neck and neck, so to speak – could vary by a million or more klicks. COLIN transit launches took some account of these variations, but since the cycle worked itself out over several years, you couldn’t just wait around and send all your traffic at the short end. That semi-famous unscheduled wake-up guy five, six years back had got lucky, hit somewhere near an opposition with the trajectory down well under the hundred million klicks.
This time around, their homecoming guy hadn’t got so lucky. Horkan’s Pride, at the thick end of the cycle, was coming home across more than three hundred million kilometres of cold, empty space.
And no lunch stops.
‘Okay,’ said Rovayo. ‘So there’s no SOS because the n-djinn is down. But there’s got to be provision for a manual back-up, right?’
Norton nodded. ‘Yes. It isn’t difficult to do, there are step by step instructions nailed up in the comms nest.’
‘And our guy chose to ignore them.’
‘So it appears, yes. He ran silent all the way home, and presumably from somewhere close to the Mars end. There’s not enough food on board to do that, not even for one person. You want to sit in silence and wait out the whole trajectory, you’ve got to find something else to eat.’
‘So the guy is fucking cracked.’ The tinge of told-you-so in Rovayo’s voice. Bending back to her original assumptions. Okay, so she’d let this be a man, but she wasn’t going to believe he could be sane. ‘Got to be. He didn’t need—’
‘Yeah, he did,’ Sevgi said it to the air, detachedly. Time to run this for everybody’s benefit. ‘He did need to run silent. He couldn’t call in the rescue ship, and he couldn’t get back in the cryocap, assuming that it would have let him, because both those options would have defeated his whole purpose.’
A flicker of quiet. She saw Rovayo shoot an exasperated glance at Coyle. The big cop spread his hands.
‘The purpose being?’
‘To get home free.’
‘Seems a little extreme,’ said Rovayo sardonically. ‘Wouldn’t you say?’
‘No, it’s not extreme.’ Sevgi could hear herself talking, but the words seemed suddenly heavy, hard to get out. The syn was deserting her, retreating from her speech centres, leaving her with the fading light of the inspiration but no clear way to get it across. She fumbled for clarity. ‘Look, spaceflight’s a closed system. You dock in orbit, that’s quarantine control, post-cryocap medical checks, ID download. A week usually, before they let you down the nanorack elevator and out. Whoever this guy was, he didn’t want to go through all that. He couldn’t afford to arrive cryocapped with the others, and he certainly couldn’t afford to be rescued. Both those options end at the nanorack. He needed to walk away unseen, unregistered. And this was the only way he could do it.’
‘Yeah, but why?’ Coyle wanted to know. ‘Six or seven months of cannibalism, isolation, probable insanity. Risking a splashdown at the end of it all. Plus hotwiring the crycocap, that’s got to carry some attendant risk, right? I mean, come on. How badly could you want to get home free?’
A wry grin from Norton, but he said nothing. Not for public consumption. Sevgi waved the diplomacy away.
‘That’s missing the point. It’s no secret that there are people on Mars who wish they’d never signed up, who’d like to come home. But they’re the grunts, the cheap labour end of the colony effort. This man was not a grunt. We’re talking about someone who’s at ease manipulating cryogen and medical datasystems, who’s able to operate the onboard emergency landing protocols—’
Yeah, that’s something else I don’t get,’ Rovayo, frowning. ‘The whole trip, this guy’s taking the passengers in and out of the cryocaps to feed off. Why not just kill one of them and stick himself in the empty freezer in their place?’
‘Kind of hard to explain when they take you out at the other end,’ said Coyle dryly.
His partner shrugged. ‘Okay, so you set the cryocap to wake you up a week out from home. Then—’
Norton shook his head. ‘Can’t be done. The cryocaps are individually coded at nano-level for each passenger, and they’ve got very rigid programme parameters. They’d reject a different body out of hand. You’d need to be a cryogen biotech specialist to get round that, and even then you probably couldn’t do it mid-transit. That kind of coding gets done while the ship’s in dock. They take the whole system down to do it. And you wouldn’t be able to recode an early wake up either, for much the same reasons. The whole point of what happened here is that it was all within the existing parameters of the automated systems. There’s programmed provision for bringing a passenger temporarily out of cryogen for medical procedures. There is no provision for swapping passengers about, or letting them wake up early. ‘
‘And he was smart enough, or skilled enough to know that,’ said Sevgi. ‘Think about that. He knew exactly which systems he could safely subvert, and he did it without tripping a single alarm in the process.’
‘Yeah, yeah, and he’s a mean hand at alternative cuisine,’ growled Coyle. ‘Your point is?’
‘My point is, anyone with the skills and strengths this man has shown would have gone out on a qualpro tour, which means a three to five year gig, no requirement to renew. He could have waited, come home cryocapped and comfortably wealthy.’ Sevgi looked around at them. ‘Why didn’t he?’
Rovayo shrugged. ‘Maybe he couldn’t do the time. Three years is a long stretch when you’re looking at it from the starting line. Ask the new fish up at Folsom or Quentin Two, and that’s just jail-time here on Earth. Maybe this guy gets off the shuttle at Bradbury, takes one look at all those red rocks and realises he made a big mistake, he just can’t go through with it.’
‘That doesn’t fit with the force of will he’d need to do this,’ said Norton soberly.
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Sevgi agreed. ‘And anyway, he could have called in the rescue ships as soon as he was outside the Mars support envelope. He didn’t—’
‘Support envelope?’ Rovayo frowned enquiry, at Norton. ‘What’s that?’
Norton nodded. ‘Works like this. If you launch a COLIN transport from Mars to Earth and something goes wrong, something that requires a rescue, then it’s only worth the Mars people coming out up to a certain point. After that point, the transport is so far along the trajectory it would have made more sense to send help from the Earth end. Anyone wanting to get home would have to wait at least until the tipover point, otherwise it’s all for nothing. Mars rescue brings you back and you’re still stuck there, with whatever penalties COLIN chooses to enforce on top. You need the rescue to come from Earth, because that way, whatever else happens to you, you’ve at least made it home. They’re not going to waste the payload cost on sending you back again, just out of spite.’