“Two minutes,” the Onboard announced. Yarrow dutifully closed her eyes and sought to prepare herself. If this was not a journey across water or through air, both elements lay at the end of it, at least in frozen potential. She concentrated on the ball of stilled volatiles, but the image that rose before her resounded with cries, elongated shadows waving down half-lit corridors flecked with blood. Yarrow shook her head, then turned to ask George if he had caught the evening feed. George was counting down the remaining seconds with eyes closed, however, so she turned back with a sigh and waited for the kick.
Pushoff was nothing dramatic, and Yarrow felt only a few seconds’ force as the extensor arm shoved the duster smoothly from the bay. George, who liked realtime models, had converted the screen before him, and now watched the starscape list slowly as the duster yawed. The rearview screen showed the Lotus retreating gracefully, its panels opened like petals to catch what the Centaur might send it. The image drifted to one side as the duster rotated into proper alignment.
“Spray-on in eighteen seconds,” the Onboard observed. George hated the duster engine, and longed for the day when the expedition had stocked enough hydrogen and oxygen to be able to blow it out thrusters and lose it forever. Yarrow, who had grown up in the rigidly closed world of the Centaur, possessed no such qualms. Accelerating minute particles of local matter to relativistic speeds pleased her costive sensibility, for even the Centaur could spare tonnes of pulverized rock. And the dust of greater Neptune—blackening the rings, coating the inner moons like carbonized exhaust—was everywhere: it filled the region inside the Roche limit in bands that spiraled down to the surface; it clumped in ring structures; it settled like soot over everything, even brilliant Triton, which sprayed nitrogen geysers to coat it with fresh snow. Dust particles fired by the engine were expelled at speeds that sent them out of Neptune orbit forever, and Yarrow—who lived in close spaces, and was neat—liked that fine.
Lights flickered across the displays, reporting the build-up of energies in the acceleration coils, the ionization rates of the reaction mass. Yarrow didn’t know why George wanted to see the figures: if something went wrong it would be corrected, or the mission scrubbed, without his intercession. She found herself feeling for the faint vibrations the swelling charge imposed on the cabin’s frame, but her clensuit muffled such faint harmonics, and it was only with “Spray on” and the growing push of the engines that she felt a roar of static, grit lofted to the velocity of flare particles. George might find engine burns routine, but Yarrow did not: Reversal had been the greatest event of her life, and every acceleration brought it astonishingly back.
Six point seven seconds of thrust—she had read the mission profile as a matter of routine—and the roar abruptly ceased, without echo or diminishing grumble. The thrill of being pressed into their couch was gone, the deceptive freedom of zero G restored. As if waking from a brief but vivid dream, Yarrow looked across wonderingly to George, who, matter of fact, had converted all the screenspace to View and had made the cabin a cupola looking upon the vastness of greater Neptune.
“Transit time?” he asked.
“Seven hours, sixteen minutes,” the Onboard replied. Yarrow could already make out the Teardrop against the field of stars, half again their size and faintly (or so she imagined) irregular. Were the comet closer to the Sun, its reflected light would shine brilliantly.
“Message from the Lotus,” the Onboard announced. “Nora Tsujimoto.”
Her voice came through tight with anxiety. “We’ve just got a short message from Castor; something about an abortive mutiny on the Centaur.”
“Mutiny?” George repeated, voice disbelieving.
“They said ‘uprising.’ No one knows anything more.”
Yarrow found herself speaking before she had registered any emotion. “Why did they say abortive?”
George shot her a look. “That’s the word they used,” Tsujimoto said fretfully. “Then they signed off. I should sign off. Call me if you hear anything.” She disappeared with a click.
Yarrow and George stared at each other.
“An uprising. What could that be?” he asked. Yarrow knew that George, like her, had already run past this point, imagining the bloody mutiny those stories used to predict and wondering what faction had sought to seize power, how the Civil Police had responded, what was happening at Castor and Pollux. It seemed somehow indecent not to pause at the brink of this calamity, to acknowledge that one had swiftly imagined the horrors beyond.
“Does the CP have guns?” she asked. It was long supposed that the cops controlled an unseen cache of weapons.
“What about the Ship’s Officers? They were military.”
“Not military as in carrying sidearms. They just wore uniforms.”
“I bet some had sidearms.”
They were avoiding the central terror, skirting a frightening vacancy whose edges crumbled larger. Yarrow began to speak, then saw that George’s eyes had taken on a distant cast, as though something puzzling had occurred to him. She touched the bead in her ear, but no voice came through. Yarrow began to ask the Onboard whether a transmission was reaching the duster when George raised his hand and tapped out a code on a square that had darkened in front of him. Her head, turning to follow his action, abruptly encountered an impedance, as though some object were resting next to her helmet. Trying to draw back, she found herself again balked. Her helmet was held fast, as in a vise.
Yarrow tried to raise her arm and found it would not move. Her clensuit had frozen in place like rusting armor.
“George!” she called. “I am experiencing suit malfunction.”
Silence. No alarms flashed; the starscape remained quiet. George’s arm had retreated from her field of vision, and she could not see the rest of him.
“Onboard: Emergency,” she said in a clear voice. “Display life support.”
“The Onboard won’t reply,” said George suddenly. “You have been denied access.”
“George, what the hell’s going on?”
“I have received a message from the Ship reporting that you are a security risk. Until the situation on the Centaur has stabilized, you are considered a danger to this mission, and must be neutralized if it is to continue. On orders from the Bridge, I have sent a command to the Onboard inactivating your clensuit’s user controls.”
“What?” Astonishment swamped any further response, even indignation. Yarrow tried to round on him, found herself unable to move, and began to struggle violently. The clensuit, still secured in its crash web, rocked slightly. She stopped abruptly, took a slow breath. Adrenaline was flooding her system: she made herself relax.
“George, that’s crazy. If I had a criminal record, I would never have made it onto the Lotus. Who gave you this order? George?”
Silence in her helmet. Yarrow listened for the sound of George breathing, but heard nothing.
“Onboard: Emergency,” she said. “Display suit functions.”
No reply, not even the response of Access Denied. Coldly, Yarrow began to test her suit’s remaining functions. Breathing air was available; the toilet systems worked. The flush of heat that had followed her initial alarm was being dispelled, and her wet underarms were drying. Yarrow guessed that the food tube near her chin would produce emergency stores on demand. But the Onboard would not respond to any summons, and attempts to place an outgoing call, or even to monitor the news feed, brought no response. Yarrow wondered if the Onboard had been instructed to disregard her orders, or she had been actually cut off from it.