*It is.'

*If you've managed to find the helmet, then you'll get past the sphinxware guarding the Palace. And if you are, as you say, Akinya . . . then the rest will follow.' She paused. *At some point, you will be challenged by more sphinxware. The answer you give will be critical. But I can't tell you what that answer should be. I've been buried under Mars for sixty years.'

*And that's meant to be helpful . . . how, exactly?'

Her eyes twinkled. *Forewarned is forearmed.'

*Thank you,' Sunday said, drenching her answer with as much sarcasm as she could muster.

*I wish I could tell you more, but the simple fact is that I only know the things I need to know, here and now. Yet wisely or otherwise I have faith in you, Sunday Akinya.'

*You just told me you're a bunch of routines stuffed into a helmet. How could you possibly know whether I'm up to the task?'

*Because you remind me of me,' Eunice said.

*You mean, up my arse with my own divine self-importance?'

*It's a step in the right direction.'

Sunday took deep and grateful gulps of air. Her clothes were soaked with sweat, sticking to her as she was extricated from the suit.

*I hope that wasn't too traumatic,' Jonathan said, pushing a glass into Sunday's clammy hand.

*You've had the helmet all this time, yet in sixty years you never figured out a way to break through the sphinxware?' She drank the glass down in one go. *Even if you couldn't do it, surely someone else would have been able to?'

*There might have been a way,' Jonathan said, *but would the risk have been worth it? If the helmet sensed it was being hacked, it might have erased its contents. Besides, it didn't really interest me.'

*I can't believe that.'

*You have to remember that I was the one who bored your grandmother. When she'd grown restless of Mars, I was happy to put down roots. The helmet was from that other part of her life, the part I had nothing to do with.'

Soya dabbed Sunday's forehead with a cloth.

*Then why dig it up?' Sunday asked.

*I still wanted to make sure it reached the right hands. If that meant acting as a curator, so be it. If I hadn't, the machines would have recycled it decades ago.'

*You can't argue with that,' Soya said.

*No, but I'm not sure what either of us has achieved. Yes, there was a message from Eunice in the helmet, and it told me some stuff. But answers? All she gave me was some cryptic horsepiss about something being a blessing or a curse. She wouldn't say which. Other than that I need to get to the Winter Palace, which is back where I started.'

*She dragged you all the way to Mars . . . to tell you the answer is on your doorstep?' Jitendra asked.

*I don't know what she was telling me.' Sunday accepted another glass of water from Jonathan. She was beginning to feel human again, save for the lingering aches and pains where the suit had been squeezing her. *There was some stuff about looking back at Earth, seeing it from all the way out.' She paused and said doubtfully, *Maybe there's more it can tell me.'

*You want to get back in that thing?' Jitendra asked, with what struck her as a particularly touching concern for her well-being.

*Maybe, when we're back in aug reach, the construct can find a way in without tripping the sphinxware to self-erase. But we have to leave the Evolvarium for that. She thinks she might have created this place, by the way. By accident!'

*She was here,' Jitendra admitted. *No one can argue with that. And when all this is over, someone really needs to dig around and find out how the Evolvarium got started. Maybe I'll do it.'

*You'll ruffle a few feathers,' Soya said.

*Good. It's about time.'

*That'll have to wait, I'm afraid,' Sunday said. *I need to get a message to Geoffrey, very urgently. Even if I left Mars right now, I'm still more than a month from home. That's too long. One of us needs to look inside the Winter Palace before Hector or Lucas gets the same idea.'

*We can reach Vishniac by tomorrow morning,' Soya said.

*Cross the Evolvarium at night?'

*It's safer when you have friends in the right places,' Jonathan said. There was a gleam in his eyes that didn't belong in a man that old. *Trust Soya a she'll get you back in one piece. But promise me something a this won't be the last time we speak, will it?'

*We've barely begun,' Sunday said.

*Count on it,' Jitendra said. *Even if she doesn't come back, I will. I'm serious about ruffling those feathers. And I have a feeling there's a lot you and I could talk about.'

*I think so too,' Jonathan said. Then he frowned slightly, turning back to Sunday. *What you said just now, about it all being horsepiss?'

*What?' Sunday asked.

*Please don't take this the wrong way, but you sounded just like your grandmother.'

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO.

Geoffrey heard his own footsteps through the suit's auditory-acoustic pickup and the timbre was different now, each footfall accompanied by a distinct steel-edged echo. The open door had shown only darkness, and it was no lighter now that they were on the other side of it, cut off from the Quaynor. He felt as if he'd climbed into the hold of a ship: some huge metal-walled void with no windows.

*There's an image-intensifier mode on these things,' Jumai said, quietly, as if there were things astir that she did not wish to alert. *Voke amplification, see what you make of it.'

Jumai was never more than arm's reach away, her form outlined on the helmet's display. Geoffrey did as she had suggested, voking the suit to apply a light-enhanced overlay. Grey-green perspectives raced away from him, curving in one direction, arrow-straight in the other. He pivoted around, Jumai manifesting as a blazing white smudge. The floor angled up behind her, commencing its great steepening arc, the arc that would eventually bring it soaring overhead and back down behind him. At right angles to the direction of curvature, the floor stretched all the way to the far endcap. He couldn't see anything of the endcap. There wasn't enough ambient light for that.

*This isn't right,' he said, shaking his head inside the helmet. *It shouldn't be like this.'

*You want to let me in on what you were expecting?'

*I've never been here before,' Geoffrey said, *but I'm very familiar with this space a from whenever she talked to us, whenever she delivered one of her sermons.' The words were a struggle. *This wasn't just an empty shell. It was full of trees, full of greenery and light. Like a jungle. There were plants, borders, paths and stairs. It rained. There should be a whole closed-cycle ecology running in here.'

*Looks more like a big room full of nothing to me,' Jumai said.

*Arethusa was here. She chinged aboard, not long before Eunice died. She'd have noticed anything strange. She'd have said something to me.'

Jumai had her hands on her hips. She was looking up, towards the central axis of the empty chamber. *Least there's a ship. That is a ship, isn't it?'

*I think so.' But he could hardly tell. It was nearly seventy-five metres away. All he could make out was a spine of organised darkness running from one end of the chamber to the other. *We need more light,' Geoffrey said decisively. *Is there a flashlight mode somewhere? I'm surprised it hasn't cut in automatically.'

*Maybe there are situations where you wouldn't want that to happen. Wait a second.' Jumai reached up and started fiddling with the crown of her helmet. *Thought I saw something while we were suiting up. Got some flares in my toolkit, all else fails.'

Light blazed from her helmet. She doused the blue-white beam against the central axis, picking out details of the Winter Queen. Geoffrey felt his world lurch slightly back into sanity, if only for a few lucid moments. He was still reeling from the absence of the jungle. Even if the air in the chamber had been swapped for pure oxygen and allowed to consume itself, there'd still be ashes . . . scorching. Yet there was nothing. The flooring under his feet had the improbable antiseptic gleam of an airpod showroom.

But the ship was real. He'd activated his own helmet lamp and was sweeping the beam along the nearest part of the Winter Queen. The deep-space explorer was a kilometre long, and even though part of that length was now absorbed into the endcaps, he still couldn't see more than a fifth of it. Yet the anatomy was unmistakable, from the cluster of fuel tanks above him to the delicate filigreed spine with its branching black complexity of fractally folded radiator vanes.

He'd seen this ship a thousand times, in countless family histories. Everything about it looked correct. But this wasn't the rotting, rusted, tree-encased carcass he'd been expecting. Winter Queen wasn't garlanded with humid green overgrowth and she wasn't laced with solar lights and an irrigation system. There were no spiral staircases rising from the floor to puncture her hull. She did not look as if she'd been stuck in here for decades.

She looked ravishingly, sparklingly new.

*Enough of this shit,' Jumai said. Her glowing form reached down and scooped something out of the holdall she'd dropped at her feet. She did something to the object in her hand and it quickened into impossible brilliance.

She tossed the little ball of light along the floor, where it bounced and rolled and then began to propel itself with a curious willingness, until it came to a rolling stop two or three hundred metres away.

Jumai did the same thing with a second flare.

They lit the entire chamber. Geoffrey squinted against the brightness until his eyes amped down their response. His suspicions were confirmed now: the ship looked as pristine as its surroundings. The two opposed centrifuge arms, one hundred and eighty metres from tip to tip, were still turning, whooshing around like the blades of a wind turbine. The capsule-shaped living pods at either end of the arms skimmed the ground with only a metre or so to spare.

*Why are they still turning?' Geoffrey asked. *There's already gravity in this place.'

Jumai looked at the swinging arms. *How fast are we spinning?'

Geoffrey recalled what he'd learned on the approach. *About three times a minute, give or take.'

*Then they're not spinning fast enough to counteract the habitat's rotation, either. I thought maybe someone had gone to a lot of trouble to recreate weightlessness, for whatever reason. But that's not it. Those arms can't be swinging around faster than once every couple of minutes, relative to us.'

*Must be a systems glitch, then,' Geoffrey said. *Something inside blew a fuse and the arms started up again. Or maybe it's just to keep the air circulating, like a god's own ceiling fan.'

Jumai scratched the back of her helmet, as if she had an itch. *Air's breathable, you realise. Someone went to that much trouble. But I'm beginning to wonder if anyone ever actually put that to the test.'

*Memphis would have breathed it.'

*If he ever came this far. And if he did . . . well, he lied to you, didn't he? Big time.'

Geoffrey wasn't keen to follow that thought to its conclusion. *I see something,' he said. *High above us, under the path of the centrifuge arms.' He pointed, and Jumai followed his gaze to the indistinct form he'd sighted, pinned to the ceiling like a squashed fly.

*Got to be Hector.'

*He's not moving.' Somewhere in the suit there had to be a mode for zooming in the faceplate view, but Geoffrey couldn't be bothered searching for it now. *I wonder if he even knows we're here. There's no aug reach, but suit-to-suit comms are still good . . .' He didn't want to voice the possibility that Hector might be dead, however plausible that now looked.

Jumai grabbed the holdall and broke into a surprisingly loose-limbed run, the suit easily accommodating her intentions. Geoffrey followed, keen to reach his cousin but anxious about what they might find. Whatever had hurt Hector might still be present. But where could anything or anyone hide, in this vast empty space? Unless Hector's attacker had retreated back into the far endcap wall, the only possible hiding place was the ship itself.

He didn't like that idea at all.

Even running against the spin of the habitat, Geoffrey didn't feel his own weight varying to any perceptible degree. They cut diagonally, Jumai tossing out another flare along the way, and slowed to a walk when they were about a hundred metres from the suited figure. The centrifuge booms were still turning, and now that they were closer there was a clear whoosh each time one of the capsules swept by them. The arms were not moving particularly quickly a scarcely more than running pace, compared to the floor a but Geoffrey nonetheless had an impression of enormous, dangerous momentum.

Hector a who else could it possibly be? a was on his back, spreadeagled and motionless, staring straight up towards the central axis and the Winter Queen. Next to him, resting on the ground, was a white rectangular box like a big first-aid kit. Traceries of luminous arterial red ran down the suit's matte-black limbs and defined the form of the chestplate and helmet. The Akinya Space logo glowed on the upper shoulder joint of the nearest arm.

Geoffrey approached the form, always keeping the centrifuge arms in view. As one of the capsules sped past him, he grasped what must have happened to his cousin. There was a door in the capsule: a dark circular aperture in the leading hemisphere.

*Hector was trying to get inside.'

*Figures,' Jumai said slowly. *I mean, he would, wouldn't he? Comes this way, finds things aren't the way they're meant to be . . . what else is he going to do but try to get aboard the ship?' She took a step back as the other capsule whooshed by. *Think this was a surprise to him?'

Geoffrey had no adequate answer for that, only intuition. *I don't like Hector,' he said. *Don't trust him, either. But I don't think he was expecting to find this place empty.' He got up close to Hector's visor, trying to make out the face behind the glass.

There wasn't one.

*The suit's empty.'

Jumai knelt down and double-checked, as if he could possibly have been mistaken. *I don't get it.'

*He must have removed the suit, then told it to wait here for him. That's what it's doing a just lying there, waiting.'

*I know there's air in here, but why would anyone be lunatic enough to get out of a perfectly good spacesuit?'

Geoffrey looked at the next centrifuge pod to swing past them, at the tiny door in its side. A suited figure could squeeze through that aperture a there'd have been little point in having it otherwise a but it would have been all but impossible to time the transition from floor to moving component. Unencumbered by a suit, though . . . and for a man who was fit and agile enough to play both tennis and polo and excel at both . . . Geoffrey wondered.

*I think he wanted to get aboard the ship. He couldn't do it with the suit on: too sluggish, too clumsy. So he got out of it. Told it to wait here, until he was ready to leave.'

*We haven't seen him,' Jumai said. *There's another way out of the Winter Palace, of course.'

*But he wouldn't have left without putting the suit back on. I think he's still inside the ship.'

Cautiously, as if he might be working a jack-in-the-box, Geoffrey eased open the cover on the white container and saw four small cylindrical devices, packed like stubby beer bottles. There were four empty spaces next to them. He tugged one of the plump cylinders out of its cushioned support matrix.

It was heavy and cold, with a sturdy flip-up arming mechanism built into the cap. The label was in Swahili, with other languages printed underneath in smaller type. *"Caution: metastable metallic hydrogen,"' he read. *"This is a variable-yield explosive device. Do not tamper with, shock or expose to temperatures in excess of four hundred kelvin, magnetic fields in excess of one tesla, or ambient pressures in excess of one hundred atmospheres. If found, immediately notify Akinya Space, Deep-System Resources."'

*You don't think he came with just the four, do you?' Jumai said.

*Perhaps. On the other hand, maybe he took the other four into the ship.'

*And set the fuses. And then issued a distress call, because something happened to him in there.' Jumai was speaking very slowly, as if she did not much care for the direction her thoughts were taking her. *Something that meant he couldn't get back out again on his own.'

*We might be in trouble,' Geoffrey said.

*You think those charges would be enough to blow up the whole habitat?'

*Don't need to be. There's a nuclear drive inside the ship.' He turned the demolition charge around, studying the fine settings around the flip-up arming device. There was a twist dial and a locking fail-safe. Tiny numerals were engraved into the twist dial. *Must be a way to trigger these remotely. But there's also a timer mode. It goes ten, twenty, thirty, sixty, ninety.'

*Seconds or minutes?'

*Minutes, I hope.' Geoffrey slid the charge back into the box, treating it as gingerly as he would a Ming vase. *We don't know that he set the timers, but it's a possibility we can't ignore.'

*He called in the Kinyeti more than an hour ago,' Jumai said. *If he armed those fuses and then ran into trouble . . . it can't be the sixty-minute fuse. But that still doesn't give us a lot of time to get out of here. We should start back now, and tell the Quaynor to pull away as soon as we're in the lock.'

*That's an excellent idea.' Geoffrey voked through visor menus until he found the option for suit removal. Typically, there were eight or nine hurdles to jump before the suit accepted that he really, honestly meant to get out of it. *But one of us has to go up there and get Hector. I'll disarm the fuses if I'm able; otherwise I'll find him and get the two of us out of there as quickly as possible. And if I can't save Hector, I'll save myself.'