Proxima

Chapter 47 2190

It was Beth and the other scouting teenagers who brought back the first news of the upstream community.

Yuri, Mardina, Delga and Liu Tao were sitting around the fire at the latest rest stop. They were huddled in layers of clothing, heavy stem-cloth overcoats over the remains of ISF-issue coveralls. Most, notably Mardina, had blankets heaped on their laps. Even Delga, who never put warmth before pride, pulled a blanket over her too. After ten years of the star winter—ten years after he and Mardina had joined this group he still thought of as “the mothers”, and with a dribble of other groups joining in the years since—they had all grown so old, Yuri suddenly thought, looking at the four of them huddled together like this, the nearest thing this mobile community had to a governing council, like four half-asleep relics in a post-apocalyptic old folks’ home.

The fire itself was a mound of peat, the compressed remains of dead stems that you found stacked in frozen heaps along the banks of the river, which in these parts, far upstream from where Yuri had met Delga and the mothers, ran deep and fast. You had to dig up the peat and let it thaw and dry out, and even then it burned with a foul stench that reminded Yuri of builders. Not that they saw builders much any more. But you never saw trees either, and this was the best they could do.

As they waited for Beth and the others to return from their scouting run, none of them spoke. None of them had the energy, Yuri thought. They had all already put in a morning’s hard labour digging out the latest storm shelters in the frozen ground, and a mutual silence was all they could manage, probably.

Yuri himself was forty-four now. Sometimes he felt a lot older. But at least he’d been spared the worst of the arthritis that plagued many of those on the march, after ten years following the river’s course as it had wound upstream to the south, years of unending toil, this way of living where you had not just to labour at your farm but every so often you had to break it down and move it further upstream, topsoil and all. No, he’d been spared that, and the worst of the limb breaks and other random injuries that came from the endless travel and labour. And he’d been spared the rash of cancers that had taken out so many, presumably caused by the radiation that poured down from Proxima’s spitting, flaring face, the star that was now significantly higher in their sky. Yes, Yuri had kept his health, more or less. But the world had caught up with him even so. Here he was in his forties with a teenage kid, and a partner of sorts in Mardina, and a share of a responsibility for the lives of fifty-odd people, the relics of six once-separate McGregor drops of colonists.

And still the empty kilometres of Per Ardua stretched endlessly around them, as the babies cried, and the parents grumbled as every morning they went down to crack the ice on the river for the day’s water…

“Here they come,” Mardina murmured. She leaned forward for more nettle tea, from the pan bubbling on the range over the fire. She was greying now, gaunt rather than slim, and even sitting so close to the fire she wore cut-down gloves adapted as mittens. Born, after all, in the Australian outback, she had particular trouble adapting to the cold. But her astronaut eyesight was as sharp as ever. And her tongue, Yuri thought.

She was right, anyhow. Here came Beth and Freddie, Delga’s son, and two others, running silently across a plain of bare earth, ice patches, snow banks, and the occasional drab green stain of Arduan life. Seventeen years old now, Beth had grown whip-thin and tall, taller than either of her parents, as had many of her generation. She was darker than Yuri, with more of her mother’s colour, but her black hair was straight like Yuri’s, lacking Mardina’s tight curls. She looked Arduan, Yuri thought. A member of a new Arduan humanity, not quite like anybody on Earth, nobody on Mars. A new branch. Born into this world, a new generation who knew and cared nothing of what had gone before, or of any other world, and that was probably a blessing.

The youngsters stumbled to a halt, panting hard. Beth dropped her thick outer coat, pulled a blanket over her shoulders, kicked off her elderly hand-me-down ISF-issue boots, and slipped on bark sandals. Yuri passed around mugs of hot tea.

Mardina peered out of her nest of blankets. “Well?”

Beth laughed, still breathing hard. “Nice welcome, Mom. We saw lots. Not far upstream from here, the river splits. Well, it doesn’t really. If you think of it flowing downstream, two big tributaries merge.”

“A confluence,” Delga said.

“Yeah. That’s the word. Lots of wet ground, marshes, mostly frozen… And we saw fantômes.” She grinned as she made her grand pronouncement.

Yuri focused. “Whoa, back up. Fantômes?” Since Delga’s people had first misidentified Yuri himself as the ghost of Dexter Cole, fantômes had become an in-joke word for strangers, more starship-stranded humans. But they had only met a few new groups since. No wonder Beth was excited. “How many fantômes?”

“Not many. There’s not much there at all, just a couple of shacks in the green, smoke from the fires. There must be fields and a ColU but we didn’t see them. And the people, we saw a few adults and kids. A dozen maybe? We didn’t stay to look too closely—”

“But they saw you.”

“Oh, yeah. Probably before we saw them.”

Liu Tao leaned forward. “In the green? Is that what you said? What do you mean?”

“Arduan green, you know, the darker green. All over the place.”

“But what about the snow, the ice?”

“Not so much of that around.” She shrugged. “Not as bad as here. I’m only telling you what we saw.”

“We know, sweetheart,” Yuri murmured, trying to reassure her, but that only won him a glare from Beth, who didn’t like those kinds of endearments any more.

The four elders looked at each other.

“We need to check this out,” Liu said.

“Obviously,” drawled Delga. “Beginning with dealing with these people, whoever the hell they are.”

“ ‘Deal with them’,” Mardina said. “Still barely civilised, aren’t you?”

Delga grinned. “Still barely alive.”

“More to the point we need to check out this greenery,” Yuri said. “Maybe we should take along the ColU.” He meant his and Mardina’s original machine, the only fully functioning unit; every other group they’d encountered had detached or destroyed the AI module of their colonisation unit to get control over the basic functions.

Mardina snorted. “That old wreck.”

Delga cackled, and Liu grinned. The tension between Yuri and Mardina was a continuing source of amusement for everybody else.

“We need to make a stop anyhow,” Yuri said reasonably to Mardina. “The stocks are low. Maybe the existence of this patch of native life is telling us that the location is a little warmer than the surroundings. A good place to do some planting.”

Liu nodded thoughtfully. “Which is why there are people already there, no doubt. We’re all looking for a bit of warmth, in the star winter.”

Yuri shielded his eyes and looked straight up at Proxima, at the huge spots that crowded its face, localised flares showing like scars. When they had landed none of them had been warned about the star winter, as they had come to call it. There were no Earthlike seasons on Per Ardua, but when its face swarmed with sunspots Proxima evidently delivered winters, winters that arrived irregularly, and lasted for an unpredictable time. It was another problem that could have been determined in advance if this world had been properly surveyed before people had been dumped on it like loads of bricks. Well, winter had come, and the whole of the trek south had been a race against the deepening cold.

Now there was this new place. In the green.

Yuri said, “If we could stay there even just a bit longer than usual, get through a few growing seasons, build up some stock…”

Mardina scowled. “But why the hell should this location be magically warmer than any other?”

“Could be a hot spring,” Liu said.

“Yeah, and so not a healthy place to stick around.”

“But somebody’s doing just that already,” Yuri pointed out. “We’ll learn nothing by sitting around here debating it. I say we fetch the ColU, and go and see what’s what.”

Then there was a pause, as Mardina sat, cradling her mug of tea. Everybody waited for her to speak.

She wasn’t the leader, exactly, not really in command. The tradition of the core of this group, the mothers—Delga and Anna Vigil and Dorothy Wynn—was that nobody was in command, least of all the men. You talked things out and came to a consensus; there were few enough of them, and generally time enough, for that. And certainly Mardina didn’t want the visibility of authority. Her former-astronaut status had been problematic from the start. Nevertheless, as Liu Tao liked to point out to Yuri over a glass of Klein vodka, you had to get Mardina’s approval before you could get on with almost anything. It was a kind of negative leadership, Yuri supposed, a leadership by veto not deployed.

“All right,” Mardina said at length. “Let’s go and see.” She began to move, stiff, reluctant; she let Beth take her layers of blankets and fold them away.

Chapter 48

A party of four of them, or five if you counted the ColU, made their way along the bank of the river, heading south, upstream to the confluence and the new community. There was only scattered cloud above, and Proxima hung high in the sky, all but overhead now they had come so far south, and their shadows were shrunken beneath them.

Beth had warned that it would take well over an hour to get around the lake, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, Yuri thought. The walk would be good for him, good for them all. Long before the confluence came into view he was thoroughly warmed up from the steady exercise, his breath steaming in the cold. As Mardina walked she stretched and twisted and worked her arms and neck, and even practised whipping her crossbow from the backpack she always carried when away from the camp. Meanwhile Delga, the fourth member of the party, stomped along, one sleeve tied off, her own pack on her back, and no doubt weapons hidden about her person. She seemed just as Yuri had known her all those years ago on Mars, despite the grey hairs, the wrinkled skin of her face distorting her tattoos. Ageing but ageless, he thought.

As for Beth, Yuri could see how his daughter, bursting with energy despite her own long run this morning, was only just staying patient with the steady plod of the old folk.

They came upon the green cover Beth had described. You could see it from a distance. Yuri saw there was no height to it; it was more like a green blanket pinned directly to the ground, like none of the native life Yuri remembered seeing before, the stems, the trees.

To avoid trampling the living cover, they stuck close to the riverbank where the ground was more or less bare. The green wasn’t a solid sheet, Yuri saw close to; he made out individual sprawling plants, blankets of greenish web spread out over the flat ground and firmly rooted by multiple skinny tendrils across their widths. They were like water lilies perhaps, or like the great triple leaves of the canopies of the northern forests.

“Fascinating,” the ColU murmured as it rolled carefully along the bank. “Yet another body plan, another life strategy. I must study the phenomenon further.”

“Hm,” Yuri murmured. Straight ahead he saw smoke rising. “I think we’ve a human phenomenon to deal with first.”

“Perhaps, perhaps. But look beyond that, Yuri Eden. What can you see?”

Yuri had to climb up on its carapace to see what it meant. On the southern horizon was a smear of cloud, thick, black. “So? Bad weather for somebody.”

“You don’t understand, Yuri Eden. We have walked far. Very far.”

“Strictly speaking you haven’t walked anywhere.”

“I think we are seeing the substellar point, at last. Or evidence of it. Logically there must be a permanent depression there, low pressure caused by the star’s heat at the point of highest stellar insolation on the planet… An endless storm. And this is our first glimpse of that undying substellar weather system. Still hundreds of kilometres away, but a remarkable sight. I am grateful to have lived long enough to see this.”

“Now don’t go getting morbid about your built-in obsolescence again,” Yuri murmured. “You know how it upsets Beth—”

There was a sharp cracking sound from directly ahead. They all ducked instinctively.

Yuri said, “What was that?”

“A gun shot,” Delga said. “Nice welcome.” She grinned, evidently relishing the prospect of a confrontation.

Mardina said, “Who would get to bring a projectile weapon down from the Ad Astra?”

“One of your lot,” Delga said. “You can talk about old times.”

Yuri said, “You think we should send Beth back?”

Beth snorted. “Like hell.”

Mardina shook her head. “We have to deal with these characters one way or another. Let’s go forward. Proceed with caution. But,” she said heavily, “stay close to the ColU for cover. OK?”

They nodded, tense, Beth more excited than fearful, Mardina calm, Delga grimly determined, Yuri concerned for his daughter.

The ColU rolled forward once more, and the four of them walked slowly beside it.

Ahead, they soon made out the settlement, smoke rising from a couple of fires, a huddle of huts that were domes of drab Arduan green. Beyond the domes there were fields bearing a lighter green, Earth green—potatoes, maybe.

And a man in a bright blue uniform, holding some kind of rifle, stood between the approaching party and the settlement. The uniform was a Peacekeeper’s, Yuri saw with surprise.

“Hold it right there,” the Peacekeeper called. “This thing is loaded, you heard the shot. And I will use it as I was trained.”

To Yuri’s astonishment he recognised the man. “Mattock. Hey, Mattock! Is that you?”

He could see the man scowl. “Who the hell are you?”

“On the ship, remember?” Yuri walked forward, hands empty and held wide from his body. “You were on my back the whole trip. Well, not just me.”

Mattock held his weapon uncertainly, then let it droop. “Eden. The asshole who got cryo-frozen.”

“And you’re the arsehole who spent the whole trip bragging about the hamburgers and the whores he was going to enjoy back on Earth, while we all spent our lives scrabbling in the dirt in this forsaken place. Remember that?”

Mattock raised the gun again. “I’m warning you—”

“Stand down, Peacekeeper,” Mardina said now, stepping forward beside Yuri. “Jones, Lieutenant, ISF. That’s an order.”

Mattock stared in disbelief at her, a gaunt figure swathed in layers of patched-up clothing. “Lieutenant Jones? Are you kidding me?”

“No. Lieutenant Jones. Who you saw stranded on this dump of a world at gunpoint. Similar to how you ended up here, I imagine. Stand down,” she repeated more sternly.

Mattock sighed, lowered his rifle, thumbed a safety. “All right. Welcome to Mattockville. You’d better follow me.” He walked off, limping.

The ColU excused itself and went rolling away to inspect the mysterious Arduan greenery. Its manipulator arms seemed to twitch with the excitement of sampling yet another alien-life mystery, Yuri thought.

Yuri trotted up to walk beside Mattock. “Hey, Peacekeeper. Do you really call it Mattockville?”

“No.”

In the little homestead there were just three low dome-shaped shacks, set around a central area where a fire burned fitfully in the open air.

People came out to see the newcomers, wary, cautious, the children wide-eyed at seeing new faces maybe for the first time in their lives. Yuri counted six adults, all white. They wore the usual remains of ISF-issue clothing, but defied the cold by padding their jumpsuits and overcoats with dried-out stem bark, so they looked like stuffed scarecrows as they waddled around. The little kids were especially comical, and they made Beth laugh.

Mattock showed them to one of the domed dwellings. It was just a frame of stems lashed together somehow, covered over with a layer of blankets and then heaps of Arduan vegetable matter, presumably taken from the ground-covering plants. The visitors went on in, ahead of Mattock. The dome was empty of people. There were pallets and chests, and bundles of clothes stuffed beneath the walls. A hearth smoked, but no fire was lit. Yuri spotted a heap of dirty ship’s-issue crockery, but there seemed no place to cook in here; maybe that was done in another dome.

Mardina said, “So this is what you can build if you don’t have to move every couple of years.”

Yuri shrugged. “We’d have done better.”

Mattock came after them into the crowded dome, followed by more adults, a woman, two men, who looked at the newcomers with a kind of nervous hostility.

Mardina tugged open her coat. “Warm around here, even without the fire.”

“Yes,” said Delga. “Thought as much even outside. Even without the fire. What’s the game, Mattock? Sitting on top of a volcano?”

He said gruffly, “You want tea?”

Delga grinned. “If you’ve got any crew-issue coffee left I’ll take some of that.”

“Not here,” he grumbled.

“Then don’t bother. Oh, here.” Delga dug into her backpack and produced a bottle.

Mattock took it cautiously. “What the hell’s this?”

Mardina said, “Klein vodka, we call it. From potatoes. Take it easy if you’ve not been used to it. A neighbourly offering.”

“We’d like the bottle back when it’s empty,” Yuri said.

“Hmph. Once I would have arrested the likes of you for carrying around illicit alcohol.”

Delga grinned. “Sure you would, and then drunk it yourself.”

Mardina said wearily, “Stow it, Delga. Look, Peacekeeper—why don’t you introduce us?”

Mattock did so with poor grace. “Bill Maven, Andrei Allen, Nancy Stiles. Sit down, for Christ’s sake.”

They sat on the floor, or on rickety chairs, trunks.

Mardina introduced her group in turn. “You’re all passengers, right? Except for you, Mattock.”

“I remember your face,” Yuri said to Andrei Allen. “From the ship.”

Allen shrugged indifferently.

“I remember you,” Nancy Stiles said to Mardina.

Mardina answered cautiously, “Oh, yes?”

“You never did me any harm, even if you were an astronaut. And anyhow, you’re not an astronaut any longer, are you? Not since they cast you down here with us. Any more than Tom Mattock here is a Peacekeeper, even if he does put on the uniform when he thinks strangers are going to show up.”

Delga laughed. “Really, Tom?”

“You’re the first that ever has, though, since the split.”

Yuri wondered: the split?

Mardina said, “I’m guessing you didn’t volunteer to stay down here, Mattock.”

“Nah. In this drop group there was a fatality on the way down, I mean in the shuttle itself. Heart attack, out of the blue, triggered by the deceleration. One of the men. I was the closest genetic match, according to the bastards who worked out those things on the Ad Astra. So I had to stay. Just like you, Lieutenant.”

Delga laughed again. “Stories like that make my own shit life worthwhile. You always were a butthole, Mattock, and you got what you deserved.”

Mattock scowled back. “How many in your group?”

“About fifty,” Mardina said. “A good number of children, some of them nearly grown—well, you saw one outside, my daughter.”

“Our daughter,” Yuri said gently.

“Fifty. Jesus.”

“And you,” Yuri said, “are, what, six adults?”

Delga asked, “So what happened to the other eight, Tom? Murder them in their beds, did you?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Andrei said. “They went their way, we went ours.”

Mardina frowned. “They?”

“We’re white. They weren’t. All sorts of shades, but none of ’em like us. Didn’t want them fathering our kids… We didn’t do them any harm. They went their way, we went ours,” he said again.

“That was the split you talked about,” Yuri said.

Mattock just nodded.

They had come across this before. Many of the already tiny parties the Ad Astra shuttle had brought down seemed to have splintered further, separating out by race, usually, or sometimes by religion, or sexual orientation.

“Well,” Delga said gleefully, “we’re all sorts, in our fifty. And our kids are a mixture too. What do you call your Beth, Mardina? A muda-muda. A half-caste. That’s us. Just a big bunch of mixed-up muda-mudas.” She laughed again, showing her teeth. “We’re going to get along just fine with you white boys.”

“Don’t pay her any attention,” Yuri said. “She likes stirring up trouble. We’ll get by.”

“Oh no, we won’t,” snapped Mattock. “You people can just keep right on moving. Pass through our land if you want, but you ain’t stopping here.”

“ ‘Our land’?” Delga murmured menacingly.

Andrei Allen leaned forward. “We found this place. We came trekking down the river just like you…”

“Good God,” Mardina murmured. “Did nobody stay where McGregor put them?”

“We were trying to get away from the cold, the winter. And we found this place, and it stayed that bit warmer—”

“How come?” Mardina asked.

Delga shook her head. “These hayseeds don’t know, astronaut. No use asking.”

“We planted our crops and we built our homes and we raised our kids, and we’re not going anywhere,” Allen said.

“And we’re not sharing,” Mattock said fiercely.

Mardina stayed calm. “There are fifty of us, Tom, and a half-dozen of you. I reckon that if we decide to stick around here you won’t have much choice about it.”

Delga laughed again. “Might is right, huh, Peacekeeper?”

Mattock glared back, red-faced. He’d been a bully on the ship, Yuri remembered, and was no doubt a bully in this little community now, lording it over his fellow colonists. A bully who was now being defied. Yuri was aware that he still had his rifle.

Just at that moment of tension Beth stuck her head in the door. “I know,” she said brightly.

Mardina asked warily, “You know what?”

“Why it’s warmer here, in this place. I heard you arguing.”

“We weren’t arguing—”

“The ColU worked it out. Come and see!”

The ColU rolled cautiously across the land colonised by the Arduan-green sheets, sticking to open ground. “It’s typical of Arduan life,” it said. “These ground-covering ‘plants’ aren’t plants at all. They’re kites!”

Beth, Yuri and Mardina followed, treading carefully. They had come maybe half a kilometre from the domes of Mattock’s settlement. From here they had a clear view of the river confluence, the two valleys snaking off to the south. And they were surrounded by alien life.

Cautiously the ColU extended a manipulator arm to prod a nearby growth, right at the junction point of its three sprawling “leaves”. The leaves fluttered and shook and rose up, and Yuri saw, yes, it was one end of a kite, and a nearby triple leaf was the other end, a big, fat clumsy kite with the characteristic six vanes of its kind. The vanes trailed tendrils, grubby threads anchored to the ground. Disturbed, the kite shook itself free of the grasping tendrils, flapped and whirled its vanes, and took off, clattering noisily away through the air until it was out of reach of the ColU. It came to a relatively open patch of ground where it settled again and spread out its vanes, snapping them open with what looked like irritation.

A cloud cleared, and the light of Proxima beat down almost vertically on the ground cover. There was a creak of shifting leaves, they barely moved, but Yuri somehow sensed the kites were basking.

“Those trailing threads are some kind of roots,” the ColU said. “Made up of chains of small, jointed stems.”

“It’s the light, isn’t it?” Mardina said. “It’s all about access to the light.”

“Yes. We’re seeing a local adaptation to the position of the star, and maybe the winter. Life on this world always competes to grab as much of the light flow of the parent star as it can. Up in the north, approaching the terminator, you can best do that by becoming a tree, growing tall and angling your big leaves at the unmoving sun. Here, Proxima is almost directly overhead. You don’t need to go to all the expense of growing a trunk; you can just cover the flat ground and let the light beat down on you. And as long as you maintain that cover, nothing else can take root and grow over you.”

“And if it does,” Beth said, “you can just hop up and fly away to somewhere safer.”

“That’s true, Beth,” the ColU said. “But it seems wasteful to maintain a whole animal metabolism just for that. I believe this sessile mode is an adaptation for the star winter. When the energy is low, all you want to do is lie there and soak it up. When the ‘summer’ returns and there’s more energy around then you can take up flying again. I suspect it’s not just a behavioural adaptation but a genetic one; in changing conditions a new epigenetic expression can deliver rapid adaptations. These winter kites are probably quite different in form from their grandparents, the summer kites. And when the summer returns, the form will switch back again…”

There was a distant rumble of thunder, from the south. Yuri, distracted, turned to look at the substellar point, that tremendous weather system, wondering if such a distant storm could throw thunder this far.

“Yuri Eden?”

“Sorry. Yeah, summer and winter kites. But what’s that got to do with Mattock being kept warm at night in his hovel?”

“Ah, yes. Another clever feature of this life mode. The surfaces of these leaves are a few degrees warmer than their surroundings; they reradiate some waste heat. And this patch of Arduan greenery is so extensive that it’s actually created a local hotspot. It’s a typical ecological feedback loop: the more the plants grow, the more ground they cover, the more they generate the heat that helps them grow.”

“But is it a big hotspot?” Yuri asked. “Will we be able to grow our crops here?”

“I believe so,” the ColU said. “Perhaps we could even encourage the hotspot to spread. Get the kites to breed, or even corral wild ones. The star winter cannot last for ever. Perhaps we can weather it here…”

As Mardina questioned it further, Yuri found his attention drawn again to the south.

Beth grabbed her father’s arm. “Dad? You aren’t listening.”

“Hmm? Sorry, honey. I keep looking at the big weather system over there. It’s just—Beth, we’ve come so far since you were born. This endless trek. You know, the ColU has figured we’ve crossed thousands of kilometres. I mean, the shuttle from the Ad Astra could have covered that in a few minutes. But we had to do it on foot. Carrying our babies.”

She snorted. “And now those babies are carrying you.”

“And we did it knowing that we wouldn’t even find any food to eat; every time we moved we didn’t just have to grow our own food, we had to create the very soil to do it. There can’t have been a trek like it in human history before.”

“Except that everybody else we found was doing the same thing.”

“That’s true. Everybody heading to the substellar, to escape the winter. Everybody heading for that—” he pointed south “—the centre of everything. The navel of the world. Right under the sun… We’re getting so close. I’m finding it hard to care much about these kites.”

“Let’s go and see what we can see.” She linked her arm in his, as she used to when she was younger, and they walked away, leaving Mardina and the ColU and the ground-dwelling kites.

Father and daughter walked together along the riverbank, heading south. They continued to try to avoid treading on the kite-leaves that plastered the ground. The green cover started to break up maybe a kilometre from the ColU.

Then Yuri stopped dead. There was something on the ground, right at his feet.

“Dad? You’ve gone quiet again.”

He looked at her. Then he pointed down, at what he’d found in the dirt, at their feet.

A tyre track. Not from a ColU, so not created by Mattock’s people. It snaked away from here, following the river, heading straight for the substellar point.

“There’s somebody in there,” Yuri breathed.

Chapter 49

The sighting of that track changed everything for the wanderers. They had to follow it, of course.

They spent a year at the Mattock Confluence, as they called it, resting, raising a crop, preparing. A whole year.

Then they began their trek to the substellar point. The weather grew warmer yet, until it passed the norm they remembered from before the star winter, and they shucked off their cold-weather clothes and raised warm-climate crops, and moved on, heading steadily south.

The trek took them two more years.

Chapter 50 2193

For the last few hundred kilometres, the land rose steadily. The river valleys they had followed since the Mattock Confluence became narrower, with steeper walls and beds of tumbled, broken rock: they were gouges cut through country that was increasingly hilly, and at times mountainous. Forest crowded the valleys, clumps of squat, sturdy, wind-resistant, fast-growing trees with wide leaves turned up hungrily to the perpetually cloudy sky. The character of the country was quite different from the plains that seemed to cover much of the continent that dominated the starward face of Per Ardua, the plains across which they had trekked to get here.

They climbed further, and found lakes nestling in the hills, fed by streams tumbling from the still higher ground ahead, choked by stem beds. And on the slopes above that there was little but a smear of Arduan lichen, with a few mobile bands of builder-like motiles or kites working the rare stem beds. The ColU speculated that the life up here, sparse as it was, was taking advantage of the relatively clement conditions of the star winter. Without the drop in temperature brought about by the big reduction in the star’s heat output, this high country would be unliveable for all but heat-loving extremophile-type life forms.

And on they climbed, into this strange, fractured upland. The valleys became narrower, steeper-walled, the river flows more energetic. They had to walk single file at times, and in the narrowest valleys they had trouble with their baggage train.

Yuri’s ColU was put to work guiding its lobotomised fellows, which were being used as trucks, dragging their pallets of food and precious topsoil behind them. It had developed a system of communication and control with trailing fibre-optic cables, which periodically got hung up on rocks or stem clumps, and Beth and Freddie organised parties of children to help out.

“But they are in continual pain,” the ColU told Mardina and Yuri. “The physical pain of the brutal surgery they underwent. Pain they do not deserve, pain they can never understand. For they are still conscious, oh yes.”

Yuri had no patience for this. “Tell it to the UN,” he would say, marching on.

With time, the country became more unstable. They would be woken from their sleep by earth tremors, violent enough to shake Yuri on his pallet. Sometimes they passed hot mud pools, scummy with purple-green bacteria, mud that hissed and bubbled—even geysers in one place, fountains of steam and hot water that erupted with great chuffing noises like a faulty steam engine. The elders fretted about getting caught in an eruption or quake, while the children told each other stories about the ghost of Dexter Cole turning over in his rocky underground bed. The ColU said they should expect this kind of activity at this, the planet’s closest point to Proxima, where the star’s gravity was deforming the world’s very shape.

The temperature continued to rise as they plodded ever further south. People didn’t wear much nowadays; on the trek or around the camp they wore shorts and loose tunics, and many of the kids ran around naked. But the trucks suffered more mechanical breakdowns as they overheated, and the number of the ColU’s complaints increased.

And the giant low-pressure system that dominated the whole province increasingly filled the sky before them, a permanent bank of cloud hundreds of kilometres wide.

The ColU explained the science to anyone who would listen. “Warm air is drawn in towards the hot substellar centre, rises and cools, and dumps its water vapour as clouds, rain, storms. The falling water gathers in rivers and streams that flow radially away from this central point—no doubt in all directions, not just to the north, the track of the rivers we have followed. This must be the essential water cycle over this Proxima-facing continent…”

But no amount of understanding helped when the fringe of the great storm reached out to lash the plodding migrants with wind and rain, and freakish showers of hail, even snow, despite the heat. Some of the migrants coped with this better than others, Yuri observed. Older folk who had spent too long in the dome-hovels of Mars or in space habs found it difficult to deal with any natural weather. The children, though, ran around in the heat or the cold, the rain or the snow, accepting it all.

Progress slowed. As the temperatures rose ever higher there were increasing arguments about the wisdom of going on at all.

Yet they persisted. The occasional glimpses of tyre tracks were lures, Yuri sometimes thought, drawing them ever deeper into the navel of the world. And if there were ISF people anywhere on this planet, where else would they be but the most geographically significant point of all?

Then, two years after leaving the Mattock Confluence, they reached a lake that sprawled across their path, and could go no further.

Chapter 51

2197

Penny Kalinski was summoned to the latest international interplanetary summit. More reconciliation talks between the UN and China, this time to be held at the Chinese capital on Mars.

Her first view of the capital, as she descended from space, was extraordinary. The Chinese name for their city meant something like “City of Fire”. This was because in Chinese tradition there were five elements, each associated with a season, a cardinal direction, and a planet. Mercury, for instance, was associated with water. Fire was associated with summer, the south, and Mars: hence, City of Fire. But the informal western name for the place, based mostly on images from orbit taken long before anybody other than a Chinese citizen had been allowed near the place, was Obelisk. And as the shuttle descended gently through the thin air of Mars—the craft was like a pterosaur, its great wings webbing on a lightweight frame—even from altitude Penny could see why the name was appropriate.

Terra Cimmeria was a chaotic landscape scribbled over by crater walls and steep-sided river valleys; from the high air it reminded Penny of scar tissue, like a badly healed burn. The Chinese settlement nestled on the floor of a crater called Mendel, itself nearly eighty kilometres across, its floor incised by dry channels and pocked by smaller, younger craters. She glimpsed domes half-covered by heaped-up Martian dirt, the gleaming tanks and pipes of what looked like a sprawling chemical manufacturing plant, and a few drilling derricks, angular frames like rocket gantries.

And at the centre of it all was the Obelisk itself, a sculpted finger of Martian stone and concrete and steel and glass—a tower an astounding ten kilometres high, a product of the low Martian gravity and human ingenuity, far higher than any building possible with such materials on Earth.

On its way in the lander sailed around the flank of the monument.

Sir Michael King, sitting beside Penny, looked over her shoulder. “They always do this,” he said. “Make sure you notice the damn thing. But you have to allow them their gesture of pride.”

“Yes. The very place where Cao Xi made the first landing on Mars, all those years ago.”

“Well, he didn’t live to see Earth again. But look at all they’ve achieved here since, out in the asteroid belt as well as on Mars. All without kernel technology too…”

And the issue of access to kernel technology was, of course, the reason why this UN delegation had come to Mars.

The shuttle glided down to a landing with remarkable grace, given its size and evident fragility, on a landing strip some distance from the main domes. The shuttle was quite a contrast to the heavily armed kernel-driven hulk ship in which the UN party had crossed the inner system. But there had been something about the slim, elegant, almost minimalist design of the Chinese-designed shuttle that impressed Penny; the delicate craft seemed a perfect fit to its environment, the tall air of Mars—an adaptation derived from generations of living here. Coming to Chinese Mars was like entering some parallel universe, where technological choices had been made differently from the UN worlds.

As soon as the shuttle was still, rovers hurried out to greet the craft, some nuzzling up against the hull to transfer cargo, fuel and passengers, and others, robots with long, spidery manipulator arms, to begin the elaborate process of folding up the shuttle’s wings, in anticipation of a missile-like launch back to orbit.

The passengers transferred to a well-appointed bus, a blister of some tough transparent material. The driverless vehicle rolled swiftly, heading along a smooth, dust-free road towards one of the big domes of the central settlement. These were huge structures of brick and concrete in themselves, but mere blisters at the feet of the great monument. Chinese staff moved gracefully through the bus cabin offering the passengers cups of water, melted from authentic Martian polar ice, so they were told.

They were in the southern hemisphere of Mars, some thirty degrees below the equator, and it was close to local noon. Seen through the bus windows the sun was high, round, faint but well defined, and the sky was an orange-brown smear—the colour of toffee maybe, Penny thought, remembering home-cooking experiments she and Stef had made as kids, under the kindly but ham-fisted supervision of their father. Experiments of which, Penny supposed sadly, Stef would have no memory.

It was already, incredibly, seventeen years since the sisters’ conceptually stunning encounter with Earthshine, and his revelation of the gravestone of their father in Paris. They had continued to keep in touch with Earthshine about the central mystery of their lives, to little avail.

And the careers of the twins, now in their fifties, had, at last, diverged. While, thanks to King and Earthshine, Penny had been gradually drawn into long-term diplomatic efforts to avert war in an increasingly polarised solar system, Stef was down on Mercury working on more studies of the Hatch. Right now the sisters were separated by something like two hundred million kilometres. It was scarcely possible for two human beings to be further apart, short of shipping one of them out to Proxima Centauri.

The bus rolled smoothly up to an airlock set in one dome’s curving wall. The uniformed staff, all smiling, ushered the guests off the bus.

Penny followed the crowd into the dome. The interior was crowded with low secondary buildings, but the dome roof itself was visible overhead, its brick and concrete reminding Penny of some great Roman ruin. Big strip lights hung from the roof, and there were screens with scrolling slogans in a Chinese script Penny couldn’t read. Meanwhile the surface space was evidently only part of this installation. Massive staircases, escalators and elevator towers invited the newcomers to descend to wide, brightly lit underground galleries, which looked like hives of industry and habitation. The design of the place, like a cross between a classical pantheon, a shopping mall, and some tremendous high-tech factory, was clearly constrained by the environment of Mars, but it seemed to have been achieved with a sense of vision that was lacking in too many offworld UN installations Penny had visited. She was hugely impressed, as she was no doubt meant to be.

Just inside the entrance plaza, an official party lined up in neat rows to meet the UN delegates. Military stood on guard, wearing Mars-colour-camouflage lightweight pressure suits. There was even a rank of children dressed in some traditional costume, swirling ribbons in fantastic low-gravity transitory sculptures that seemed to hang in the air. Drone cameras hovered overhead, capturing the moment.

The focus was on the seniors, of course. Sir Michael King as CEO of UEI, now eighty-two years old, had been a major facilitator of this conference, and he and his equally elderly colleagues were greeted individually by Chinese officials. But more Chinese came forward, some in military uniform, many in civilian clothes, closing in on the visitors. Penny saw that at least one guide had been assigned to every member of the visiting party.

Sure enough, one young man broke from the rest and approached her. “Colonel Kalinski?”

Penny tried not to flinch; even now, aged fifty-three, she tended to recoil from individual attention. “That’s me.”

“My name is Jiang Youwei.” He offered a hand, and she shook it. He was tall, slim, dark, composed. He wore a one-piece jumpsuit, utilitarian but smart, even elegant. She thought it made her own sparkly ISF uniform seem kind of obvious, gaudy. “I am twenty-four years old; I am a graduate student in theoretical physics here at our university, and I have been assigned as your personal guide during your stay here.”

His English was flawless, with a trace of an Australian accent, she thought, maybe tutored by natives of a nation now firmly embedded within the Greater Economic Framework back on Earth. And—for God’s sake—he was nearly thirty years younger than Penny.

“Thanks, but I’m kind of self-reliant. I don’t really need—”

“You are free to choose another companion, though I would be personally disappointed. In fact I volunteered. I have studied your and your sister’s work and career path, as much as has been made available to us. I am afraid the option of no companion at all is not available. There are, after all, security issues.” He smiled easily. “Sooner me than one of those fellows with the guns, Colonel.”

She had to laugh, and gave in. “All right. So what’s on the agenda?”

“We have twenty-four hours before the formal sessions begin. There are dinners later, and so forth. Some of your party are required for preliminary press conferences—”

“Not me, thank the Great Galactic Ghoul,” Penny said. King had warned her off; the public events would be formal dances of protocol and etiquette with no serious content, and as a mere science adviser she wouldn’t be needed.

“Then you are free.”

“Do I need to go and unpack?”

“If you wish. Your bags are being transferred to your rooms, in the Cao Xi Obelisk itself, in fact. I can take you there if—”

“Believe me, I’m fine. We flew out on a hulk ship like a fancy hotel. Not exactly what I’m used to. They even served coffee on the shuttle. I guess I’ve had enough pampering for now.”

He nodded. “Then would you like the guided tour?”

She patted his arm. “If I can’t get rid of you, I may as well make use of you.”

He laughed, and she decided, tentatively, that she liked him.

Jiang led her down an escalator into an underground level. From here, more walkways and cargo ramps descended even deeper into the Martian ground.

This seemed to be basically an industrial area; through glass walls she saw gleaming manufactories where robots and white-suited humans worked side by side to assemble impressive-looking machinery. People walked everywhere, bright, busy, or they rode smart-looking robot carts, and the halls were noisy with their chatter. There were few residences on this level, no dormitories or schools or hospitals, though she did spot a few shops and restaurants, and noodle bars where workers lined up patiently. She saw no obvious signs of security.

Jiang Youwei discreetly observed her. “You walk easily, though you are new to Mars.”

“You say you know about me.”

He smiled. “I know you are a seasoned interplanetary traveller. That much is public knowledge. You have visited the moon, Mercury, and now Mars. I myself was born and raised on Mars, here in this city in fact, though my parents were originally from New Beijing. I have never left this planet.”

“Well, you learn to adapt to the gravity, wherever you go. On the moon, you don’t so much run as bounce kangaroo style.”

“Children discover these things for themselves, as I did. The human frame instinctively reaches for a minimal-energy solution to each mode of ambulation, though these solutions are quite different on each world.”

“ ‘Minimal energy’, huh. I guess you really are a physicist.”

They paused by a window where robots and humans laboured to assemble a gadget, a long, heavy tube plastered with warning labels, like a finless missile.

“An aquifer bomb,” Jiang said. “Or at least the delivery system. The fissile material will be loaded into it away from the public areas.”

“I should hope so. Part of your terraforming programme, right? The extraction of water from the aquifers.”

“Indeed. No detonations are scheduled for the period of your stay. And in any event, none are allowed close enough to cause any risk to the monument.”

She peered in through the glass. “Golly gosh. All this heavy stuff right in the shop window—and right where dignitaries like me are going to come rolling in off the bus to see it! What a coincidence.”

He laughed. “One must put on a show. In fact the city’s primary product is more abstract.”

“You mean the software and AI technology you export to Earth…”

They walked on.

“You must understand this is a deliberate strategy. It was once a truism that interplanetary trade would forever be impractical because of the cost of transport. Not so. Our miners in the asteroid belt are already selling raw materials to UN nations on Earth, as well as to your colonies on the moon, as you know. But here at Obelisk we have created a hub of excellence in software and AI development. Of course, the transport costs to ship such products off-planet are minimal, merely a question of data transfer.

“This was planned. Despite the priorities of survival, resilience and protection, from the beginning the city was built on a top-quality information technology infrastructure. Excellence in the education of the young was a priority; we have a system of rewarding achievement which—well…” He smiled modestly. “You might call it social engineering, although I understand that term has negative connotations in the West. I can only say that it benefited me hugely, and this community, which has grown rich in intellectual capital.”

She spotted a crocodile of schoolchildren, evidently visiting the area, walking in pairs hand in hand, boys and girls in bright green uniforms: green, of course, for visibility on Mars, with its palette of rusty red and brown. They stared openly at Penny—there were few Western faces to be seen here—and she took care to smile back.

She said, “I’d be interested in a discussion on the nature of freedom here before I leave.”

“I would enjoy that.”

Chapter 52

2193

Beth, Freddie and some of the other youngsters loaded backpacks and set off west to attempt a circumnavigation of the lake.

The rest pitched camp in their practised fashion, laying down hearths, digging out storm shelters and latrine trenches, erecting their tepees and houses. The trucks, released from the ColU’s direct control for these simple tasks, got to work ploughing up yet another stretch of Arduan ground, digging out fields extensive enough to raise a quick crop.

The ColU itself, meanwhile, rolled down to the lake, where there were wide stem beds, and communities of builders with their usual nurseries, middens, dams, weirs and traps. It was almost like the builder projects around the jilla lake, Yuri thought. But there was no evidence that these builders were making any effort to manage this lake as a whole. The ColU watched the builders patiently, inspecting their structures, even communicating with them with its manipulator-arm hand-puppet builder talk.

When Beth and the rest returned from the lake, Mardina gave them a camp night off to recover, feed, wash. Then she called a council of war.

The core group were Mardina, Yuri, Delga, Liu Tao, Mattock. They gathered around a hearth, unlit but with its base slabs of basaltic rocks still hot enough to warm a pan of nettle tea. Other adults gathered close by to listen, a dozen or so, dozing, doing chores, with kids running around at their feet. The rest stayed away, working, napping in the heat. The ColU rolled up too, silent, massive, its hull and manipulator arms grimy from the soil it had been working.

At last Beth and Freddie showed up, all but naked save for strips of stem-bark cloth at breasts and groin, and well-worn bark sandals on their feet.

Beth gracefully helped herself to a mug of tea. She was twenty years old now, and as she moved Yuri noticed how the men in the group reacted to her slim grace. Her tattoos showed up on her dark, sweat-streaked skin: on her face was etched a mask something like Delga’s but less severe, more stylised, and there was a kind of sunburst design on her back, a Proxima-like star poised over an upturned human face. She had had almighty battles with her mother about getting these done; Mardina the ex-astronaut associated tattoos with gangs and drugs and criminality. But most of the kids, especially those from the mothers’ group who had started the fashion, wore tattoos of one kind or another. It was about the only kind of art they could practise, and for sure the only kind they could carry as the group continued its endless migration. Yuri had stayed out of the argument. Delga, poster model of the tattooed crowd, had just laughed.

“So,” Yuri said, prompting Beth. “You’re back earlier than you thought.”

“Yeah.” Beth sat on her haunches, sipped her tea, and glanced around the group, confident in herself. “You know we hoped to go all the way round the lake. We started on the north side, and went west and skirted that shore, and came to the southern shore. Then we came to a river we couldn’t cross, a heavy flow that comes down from the higher ground to the south.”

Freddie said, “The river water pushes right out into the lake. You could see the mix of colours, the mud it raised.”

“OK,” Mardina said. “And can you get any further south?”

Beth said, “You could follow the river valley. But it looks like it gets pretty narrow, and there’s a steep climb.” She grinned at Yuri. “Dad, there’s a waterfall! You should see it. And beyond that the ground just rises up, and there’s a sort of forest. Not like the trees at home.” By which she meant the place she had been born, near the stately forests of the far north. “These are short, lots of branches, rattled around by the wind. It’s hot and steamy. I can’t imagine us ever clearing it, and living there. But…”

“Yes?”

She grinned. “We saw more tyre tracks. Heading off south into that jungle.”

Mardina murmured, “There has to be some kind of base in there. A technologically advanced base, sitting at this pivotal point on the planet, while the rest of us scrabble in the dirt.” She glanced at the cloud-covered sky. “ISF. Presumably resupplied from orbit. Maybe even relieved by the return of the Ad Astra, or some other ship. Christ. I was right all along. They never did leave.”

Delga said, “Well, we’re going in to see. Right?”

The ColU said, “If I may speak, Lieutenant Jones—”

Mardina said, “When have I ever been able to stop you?”

“There is another reason to go into the Hub.”

Yuri said, “ ‘The Hub’, ColU?”

“Forgive me. That is the local builders’ term for the substellar point. Probably a term used across the planet, in fact. ‘Hub’ being my translation of a term that also refers to the cylindrical core of their stem bodies.”

Delga snorted. “You’ve been talking to those spindly little jokers again. What a waste of time.”

“I cannot agree,” said the ColU precisely. “I learn a great deal whenever I meet a new community. Their language is very ancient, quite static; their culture is locally variable, but there are many universals. Such as the concept of the Hub. This is my interpretation of a complex idea… To the builders, the substellar point is the centre of the world, a pivotal place. Yet it is a lost place. It is their Garden, Lieutenant Jones. That is where they lived before they Fell, they believe. It is the centre of their consciousness. Much of this is a very old apprehension. Memories deep and old, like relics of animal ancestries. You humans have the trees, from which your ancestors once descended. The builders have the Hub.

“Yet there is a newer layer of meaning. These local builders seem to speak of recent events. They did return to the Hub, I mean in living memory—why, I am not certain, but surely to perform some task. That is what builders do. They worked here. But now they are excluded.”

“By the ISF team in there,” Mardina said grimly.

“Presumably.”

Liu Tao said, “What concerns me is how we’re going to live here.” Since leaving the confluence Liu had taken a young wife, a daughter of Dorothy Wynn, who had given him a child, a daughter called Thursday October—named that way for her Earth-calendar birthday. Yuri had seen how Liu’s priorities had changed dramatically once the kid had arrived. “Whatever we do about the ISF and the Hub, let’s get it done, so we can get out of here.”

“I would agree,” the ColU said. “The star winter won’t last for ever. I have in fact been making this point for some time.”

“We know you have,” said Yuri.

“When normal temperatures return, this region will become uninhabitable—”

“We know.” Mardina looked at Yuri, Delga—even Mattock the former Peacekeeper, who was scowling furiously at the idea of some kind of well-equipped ISF base on this planet, from which he was obviously excluded too. “We’ll go back north,” Mardina said. “But not before we go and see what’s in this jungle. We’ve come this far. Anybody object violently to that?” There was no reply. Mardina stood up. “OK. We’ll take the trucks, or at least one of them. Beth, Freddie, you scouted it out. Work out a route, a way in. Yuri, you can work with the ColU on how to manage the trucks. We’ll take our time. Get ready properly. Then we go in,” she said evenly.

“What about weapons?” Liu asked. He looked around the group. “I’m just asking.”

Delga laughed.

Mardina asked, “Is there any of that tea left?”

Chapter 53

The party to travel was pretty much self-selecting.

Mardina and Mattock, stranded astronaut and Peacekeeper respectively, had the strongest personal reasons for going to seek out whatever the ISF had left behind in the Hub. Mattock even put on the remains of his Peacekeeper uniform, though he was going to be way too hot in it. Delga and Liu were going in as representatives of their factions. As a captured Chinese, Liu had even less motive than the rest to go near any semblance of UN authority. But he had a group behind him too, roughly those who had once endured the rule of Gustave Klein, and they had to be represented.

Yuri had to go, because Mardina was going in with Beth, who had scouted out the route. Where his family went, he must go too.

And, incredibly, they took a bunch of builders. The ColU somehow talked them into it. If the authoritarian-type humans in the Hub, a builder name for a builder location, had thrown these natives out, maybe it was right to take them back in.

The other kids watched the adults getting ready to go. They seemed bemused by the whole thing, uncaring; to them the ISF was a fantasy of their parents’, as unreal as the ghost of Dexter Cole.

The party walked in a convoy, the ColU and one of the dumb trucks at the centre, the humans walking alongside. They all wore packs, with some food, water, weapons, though most of their stuff was on the back of the truck. Beth went ahead, running with a natural fluidity despite the heat. Tom Mattock trailed behind. He looked ridiculous in his Peacekeeper uniform, he was hampered by his limp, and he was soon overheating.

And a little party of builders, Yuri counted nine, all adults, came spinning and skimming behind.

They skirted the southern shore of the lake and made it to the estuary where Beth and Freddie had had to give up their attempted circumnavigation of the lake. The river they’d found flowed out of a belt of forest, dense and green, and Yuri thought he could feel the humid heat radiating from the forest even from this distance, a few kilometres away.

“Look,” Beth called, pointing. “You can see the tracks we made before.” A half-dozen sets of human footprints, one of them barefoot, Yuri saw, snaking off to the south.

Mardina grunted. “And beside them, this.” She pointed to a set of tyre tracks, more footprints of booted feet, another set of tracks heading back to the jungle. “They saw you, Beth. They came out for a look.” She glanced up at the jungle. “They know we’re on the way.”

Liu shrugged. “They probably always did. What’s the point of them being here at all if not to watch us?” He glanced up at the sky. “We Chinese have plenty of stealth sats in orbit around Earth, and Mars, that no UN body has ever spotted. Probably the other way round too.” He waved into the air. “Hi, Major McGregor!”

They walked on, Mardina leading the way south, along the river valley. She said, “But they haven’t done anything about it. Maybe they can’t do anything. They’ve been here twenty-plus years already. Shit breaks down.”

“Or they don’t know what to do about us,” Yuri said. “I mean, we aren’t supposed to be here, are we?”

“True,” said the ColU. “Each dropped group was programmed to be sedentary. And besides, the belt of heat and aridity around this Hub should have excluded foot travellers.”

Yuri said mildly, “But nobody at the ISF seems to have ‘programmed’ a migrating lake. Or a star winter.”

“Or human nature,” Liu said with a grin. “And here we are.”

They had to climb up a rock face, past the pretty impressive waterfall Beth had told Yuri about.

Then, after a couple of hours, they reached the rough boundary of the central forest. As Beth had described, the trees were not like those of the great canopy forests of the higher latitudes; these were shorter, with stout, squat trunks, and multiple leaves sprouting from stubby branches. But their trunks were just the usual scaled-up stems, the short branches and small leaves no doubt local adaptations to the turbulent substellar weather.

Mardina called a halt before they took on the forest interior. There was a pond nearby, thick with stems, and the builders skittered off that way.

They parked the truck and the ColU well away from the forest and its unknown dangers, and set up camp for the night. They built a fire for washing water and to boil up tea, and prepared to take turns to stand watch, under the unchanging grey sky.

Yuri found it difficult to sleep, under a quickly erected tepee. It wasn’t like in the permanent camps, there were no little kids running around, nobody getting drunk on Klein vodka. But Peacekeeper Mattock did snore like his throat had been slit. And one of the mutilated ColUs gave off an endless low hum of small sounds, a whir of pumps, a hiss of hydraulics, the occasional cough of some small engine. Yuri’s ColU blamed its lobotomy; its “subconscious”, the semi-autonomic systems that ran the truck’s infrastructure, were full of small malfunctions as a result. Beth suggested the truck was having bad dreams. The ColU said that was more true than not.

In the camp morning they packed up and got ready to push on into the alien jungle. Beth, who’d been up early and had done some scouting, thought she had found a path.

The ColU, deploying its sensor arm, confirmed it. “Vehicles have travelled this way, leaving characteristic traces—even faint radioactivity in places—though an attempt has been made to cover up the tracks. Nevertheless, a way exists.” It plugged its fibre-optic cable into the dumb truck, said, “All aboard,” and set off without hesitation into the jungle, leading its passive partner.

Yuri, Mardina and Beth clambered aboard the ColU as it rolled off. Mattock, Delga and Liu took the truck. The builders, without apparent concern, followed in their wake, but they kept away from the human-made track, preferring to work their own way through the thicker undergrowth.

As soon as they got into the shade of the trees Yuri was immediately hit by the increased heat, the humidity; it was like entering some huge mouth, and he was glad he wasn’t walking. Yuri heard Mattock wheezing as he gulped down water.

The light had an oddly liquid quality, as if they pushed through some murky pond, stained with Per Ardua’s sombre green. The canopy here was low, not the virtually solid roof of the high-latitude forest; the smaller leaves let plenty of light get through to the ground level, where a healthy undergrowth sprouted. When a wind blew up—bringing the travellers no relief, the moving air itself was hot and moist—the stubby branches of the trees shook and rattled. Insects, or insect-analogues, fluttered around, the size of butterflies but built from sticklike stems and bits of filmy webbing. They landed on the skin of the people, only to lurch away again apparently disappointed, but they kept coming back for another try. Yuri suspected they would be a plague until they got out of the jungle.

And they started to see animal life, some of it built on an impressive scale: hefty-looking kites in the trees’ upper branches, smaller than those of the high-latitude forests but more powerful-looking to Yuri’s eye, and smaller, even stronger-looking flightless versions that scuttled across the forest floor. One big beast with flight-vanes like samurai blades sat and watched them go by, with multiple upright eye-leaves.

Beth was holding a crossbow, loaded. “I do not like the look of that.”

“I think we must expect vigorous variants of life here,” the ColU said as it rolled forward. “More energy is available from Proxima here than anywhere else on the planet. Rather like the forests that once swathed Earth’s tropics, there is plenty of opportunity for life here, for speciation. Perhaps, for example, the kites first evolved here. Some may have migrated to the high-latitude forests and adapted. Others might have settled on the lakes and marshes. Yet others might have stayed here and given rise to the flightless predatory forms we have glimpsed.”

“Just so long as they don’t try predating on me,” Beth murmured.

Rain fell.

Just like that. There was no sense of a start or a finish to the storm; it just descended, all at once, sheets of water piling down vertically between the trees, or dripping from foliage that seemed to be of no use in shielding the party.

They were all soaked immediately. And when the water started running over the ground, the vehicles had to slither to a stop. They found what shelter they could, under the trees, huddled against the ColU. Beth put her arm around Mardina. Yuri held up his face to the rain, hoping for some relief from the heat, but the water itself was warm, and faintly briny when it worked into his mouth, perhaps evaporated from some salty inland sea.

There was a tremendous crack of thunder, a flash of lightning that seemed to light up the whole forest.

Then the rain stopped, as suddenly as it had started. Still, however, the water dripped from the trees in a shower on their backs and heads. The light got a bit brighter, but there was no direct sunlight, no break in the cloud layer.

And Mattock was groaning.

Yuri looked back. The Peacekeeper, with his soaked uniform open to the waist, was doubled over in the mud, gasping, like he was drowning. Liu and Delga were trying to grab hold of him, to get him on his back.

Mardina slapped the hull of the ColU. “He’s sick. Do your stuff.”

The ColU lumbered around, sending up a spray of watery mud and leaf matter, and rolled back. With a combined effort of all five of them—“One, two, three!”—they lifted Mattock off the ground and onto the ColU’s carapace. They laid him out, tucking spare clothing under his head, while the ColU’s fine manipulator arms took his pulse, checked his airways, took his temperature with a fine probe in the mouth. Then an equipment bay in the ColU’s flank opened up and a drip feed snaked into his upper arm.

Liu asked, “So what’s wrong with him, autodoc?”

“The heat,” Delga snarled. “What do you think?”

“That’s true,” the ColU said. “I believe he may have had a mild heart attack. He needs proper treatment—his temperature needs to be reduced quickly—”

Yuri said, “But we’re stuck here. The ground is a pond after that storm. If we try to move, even if we back out of here, we’ll end up smashing into a tree.”

Beth watched all this. “We need help, then,” she said. She walked a few paces into the forest, the mud splashing her bare legs. “The game’s over!” she shouted. Her voice echoed in the forest, and somewhere there was a bird-like fluttering as a startled kite flew away. “You blokes in the IFS!”

“ISF,” her mother murmured gently.

“Whatever. We know you’re watching us. Well, you can see how we’re fixed. Mr Mattock is going to die unless you help him. So come on. No more of these stupid games you people play. Come on out, ready or not. Why, he even put on his nice blue uniform just for you—”

And there was a crash of foliage, lights that glared bright. A truck—no, a kind of armoured car, Yuri thought, like a beefed-up Mars rover—came barrelling out of the heart of the jungle. It was basically a camouflage drab green, but it had mud-splashed logos, of the UN, the ISF, even the name of the Ad Astra carefully lettered on its side. And Yuri saw goggled eyes peering at him from out of a slit window.

Chapter 54

The rover skidded to a halt, just feet away from the ColU, sending up a mud spray. Beth flinched back, hiding behind Yuri. He reflected that, Ardua-born, she’d never seen a vehicle travel so fast.

“ISF,” said the ColU.

“ISF,” said Yuri.

“Told you so,” said Mardina.

The ColU said, “I have misled you. After all this time… but not intentionally. I did not know they were here.”

“They lied to you, just as much as to us,” said Yuri.

The ColU went ominously silent.

“Later, ColU,” Mardina said. “Don’t go crashing on us now.”

A heavy door opened with a hiss of hydraulics. The man that emerged looked overdressed to Yuri, given the heat, in a heavy coat and trousers in the drab green shades of Per Ardua, and he carried another thick jacket. He had a weapon at his waist, Yuri saw, a vicious-looking handgun, clearly visible. He faced the group, who stood around the suffering Mattock on the ColU. He looked seventy, at least. Under a blue Peacekeeper’s beret, greying hair was plastered down by sweat.

Yuri knew who this was. “Peacekeeper Tollemache,” he said, wondering. Decades older, heavier, but undoubtedly him. “I thought I’d enjoyed your company enough on the ship.”

Tollemache sneered. “Shame you still haven’t got the bruises I gave you, you little shit. I can’t say I’m glad to see you again. Or any of you losers. Good Christ, look at you, you’re a pack of scarecrows.”

Delga laughed at him. “Remember me, Tollemache? You owe me money.”

“Fuck off. Which of you bastards is the sick bastard?”

Mardina glared. “Which do you think?”

Tollemache stomped over to the ColU, glanced over Mattock, and placed his spare coat over him. “Get that drip out of his arm. We’ll get him into the truck and back to the base.”

They got organised. There was a stretcher in the rover, quickly unfolded, and under Tollemache’s brusque directions they prepared to lift Mattock into the rover’s interior. The migrants had to do it themselves; Tollemache stood by, and nobody else came out of the rover to give a hand.

The rover’s interior was brightly lit and smelled of disinfectant. Yuri could see there was a driver in a sealed cabin upfront, beyond a thick window. Beth looked around the vehicle in wide-eyed wonderment. Mardina’s look was more complex. Resentful, perhaps. Anger building. Struggling with the Peacekeeper’s heavy body in this clean technological space, Yuri felt grimy, out of place.

“I don’t get putting a coat on top of him,” Liu admitted. “Won’t that just make him hotter?”

“I’ve seen this design before,” Mardina said. “Tollemache’s wearing the same. There’s frozen ice in there, inside insulated layers.”

“And built-in cryo circuits,” Tollemache said. “They left us ready for the heat here. They gave us the right kind of diet to cope, extra vitamin C, low calories, low protein, high carbs… They monitor us, I mean the autodocs, they take our temperatures all the time.”

“With a probe up your ass,” Delga said. “I do hope they stuck a probe permanently up your ass.”

Tollemache ignored her. “Anyway it’s been easy since this star winter, as you call it, cut in. Not like before.”

Yuri said, “ ‘As we call it.’ You hear everything we say, do you?”

“The AIs listen in, and filter. Don’t flatter yourself, shithead. You’re not that important.”

“I knew it,” Mardina said, her voice thickening with anger. “I knew it, all these years. I told you, Yuri.”

“Yeah. But they never came out of their box to help you, did they?”

Tollemache pointed. “Get him strapped down on that couch. There won’t be room for you all to ride. Two of you, with him. The rest will walk with me. If you can keep up.”

Mardina and Beth got into the back of the rover. The door flaps closed up seamlessly, and the rover rolled back, did a brisk turn, and pushed away into the forest.

Tollemache faced them, Yuri, Delga, Liu. He pointed the way the rover had gone. “Follow the rover. I’ll follow you. I don’t trust any of you.”

Delga just laughed at him. She walked away with Liu.

Yuri said, “Our ColU—”

“It can follow us. And the one you wrecked.”

“It wasn’t us—ah, the hell with it.”

As they walked, Yuri was soon immersed once more in enclosing, withering heat, and he hoped it really wasn’t far to this base of Tollemache’s. Tollemache himself walked boldly enough, but Yuri wondered how much good his ice-laden suit and all the rest actually did him.

There was a clattering noise behind them. Tollemache whirled, drawing his gun. “Fucking woodies.”

“What? You mean builders. We call them builders.”

“I know you do, and I don’t care. Annoying little bastards. Not even much use for target practice.” But he raised his gun anyhow.

So this was how the builders had been excluded from their forest. “Leave them alone,” Yuri said, suddenly angry. “They’ve more right to be here than you have, Peacekeeper.”

Tollemache grunted, but moved on.

“So,” Delga called back. “The Ad Astra’s long gone, and you’re still here, Tollemache.”

“Not all of it.”

“What?”

“Not all the Ad Astra left. You’ll see. They split the ship, dropped one of the hulls here, at the substellar.”

And Yuri remembered sighting the ship in his telescope, when it was still in orbit, with just a single hull.

“Turned it into a long-term hab. They weren’t going to let you shitters run around killing yourselves without some monitoring, were they? Although all we ever do is keep score. It’s not so bad. We got a five-hundred-year nuke power plant, hot water, downloads from Earth, everything. They asked for volunteers to man it.”

Delga laughed. “You actually volunteered, you dumb schmuck.”

Tollemache was not a man to hide his anger. “You keep that up and I’ll stitch you a new tattoo before we get to the base.”

“But you volunteered,” she persisted.

“Five years. That was the deal. They were building another ship, going to send it out. They’d cycle us back to Earth after five years. They were offering a hell of a bonus.”

“But they never came back,” Delga said.

“Incredible,” Yuri mused. “They told us it would be a century before another call. What they told us was more true than what they told you.”

Delga laughed again. “What’s it like in there after twenty years, Tollemache? Worn out the pause button on your porn machine yet?”

“Fuck off, lizard lady—hey! What the hell?”

There was a blur of motion to their left, a clattering like chopsticks.

“It was the builders,” the ColU said calmly. “They were following us, at a distance. And now—”

“They just took off,” Liu said.

“Where to?”

“How should I know?”

“They seemed keen to find something, deep in this forest,” the ColU said. “A forest from which they have been excluded for some time, remember.”

Yuri eyed Liu.

“Let’s go and see,” Liu said.

“Hell, yes. Come on, before we lose them!”

They both ducked off the trail and into the deeper forest.

“Hey!” Tollemache yelled. “Get back here, you little shits!”

Yuri heard Delga cackling.

Ahead, Yuri could just see a builder, skittering and whirling. He lunged on, but quickly lost sight of his prey. “Liu—which way now?”

“Right, I think. I just saw—yeah! There. Come on!”

They plunged into the forest, crashing through ever denser foliage, moving as fast as they could, trying not to lose sight of the fleeing builders, outpacing the ColU. But Yuri quickly tired in the smothering heat. There was no sense of direction in this dense, clinging forest, no shadows cast from the clouded-over sky—and the overhead sun would have been no use for wayfinding anyhow. Yuri was soon turned around, with no idea which way they had come, where they had got to.

Then they came to a clearing.

They stood inside the last rank of trees, breathing hard. This open space, maybe twenty paces across, was a rough circle. No trees grew here, but there was a thick bed of stems over a patch of swampy ground.

And the builders were here, the nine who had travelled in with them from the lake to the north. They whirled and clattered and skimmed across the muddy ground, dragging away stems as they went. Every so often two or three would encounter each other, and they would share their peculiar dance-like communications.

“We need the ColU,” Liu said, breathless. “I wonder what the hell they’re talking about.”

“I don’t know. But they’re clearing those stems pretty quickly.”

It seemed only minutes before a patch of ground, a rough square maybe ten metres across, had been cleared. Now some of the builders worked their way through the exposed mud, whirring around like propeller blades. Others were hastily digging out a kind of trench, leading away from the central area, through which water was soon trickling.

“Look at that,” Liu said. “They’re draining this bit of swamp.”

“Yeah. And digging up the mud. See how hard they’re working. Like they’re desperate to do this. This is what they’ve been excluded from, I guess. Come on, we’ll help. Let’s get filthy.” Yuri got down on his hands and knees in the clinging mud, and began to haul at the heavy stuff, picking up handfuls and hurling it away.

Liu grunted, then got down warily. “OK. But when my heart gives out, go get Nurse Tollemache…”

The two men made little impact on the mud layer compared to the remarkably efficient spinning of the builders. Nevertheless Yuri soon got down a metre or more in the patch he was digging.

And then he found a hard surface, under the mud. Shocked, he pulled back.

He dug in again, clearing a space. That deep surface was hard, flat—and cold, certainly colder than the mud that overlay it, colder than the air in the forest clearing. Growing excited now, he hauled at the mud in great armfuls, until he had exposed a stretch of some kind of floor, perfectly flat, grey, hard to the touch.

Liu was staring. “I found the same. What the hell is it? Some kind of metal?”

“I don’t know.”

“An artefact? Human, or…”

Yuri just shrugged. He was beyond questions.

“How come Tollemache doesn’t know about this? If they’d found it you’d think they’d have it dug out by now.” He laughed. “Or stuck it on a plinth in the UN Plaza.”

“Tollemache doesn’t know because he never looked. They must have chased away the builders rather than watch what they were up to.”

He thought he saw a seam now, a fine line in the surface, so fine it was almost invisible. He traced it with his thumb. He dug out the mud, working backwards on his knees, exposing more seam. It seemed to be curving inward, gradually. He dug and dug, following the seam.

Until Liu tapped him on the shoulder. “Time to take a step back, buddy.”

Yuri stood, covered in mud, panting, sweating. He’d forgotten how hot he was.

And he saw that while he’d dug his clumsy trench the builders had cleared the rest of the area. They had exposed a metallic floor, still mud-streaked but gleaming in the grey light of the clouds. There were shapes cut into the upper surface, like three-pointed starbursts a metre or so across—clusters of three at a time, all the way across the floor.

“There’s your seam,” Liu said, pointing.

It was a perfect circle maybe three metres across, cut into the grey floor. It seemed obvious what this was. Set in the ground of this alien world, known only to the builders, it was –

“A hatch,” Yuri said. “We found a hatch.”

Chapter 55

When Yuri, Liu and Tollemache finally got to the Peacekeepers’ encampment after their diversion to the builders’ hatch, they found the Ad Astra hull lying on its side in the substellar forest. After more than two decades mature trees crowded around the hull, obscuring it, so that coming upon it was like discovering the relic of some lost civilisation. Huge cargo-bay doors were raised at the rear end of the hull, exposing garages, workshops, stores; tarpaulins hung over the doors to keep out the rain, lashed down against the wind.

By the time Yuri and the others arrived, the driver had backed his rover into a bay in the belly of the hull. The ColU was parked up too. Yuri saw its camera eyes fixed on him with a longing to know what they had found. “Later, buddy,” he murmured.

A people-sized door was opened in the hull’s flank, with a short set of steps lowered to the ground. Waved forward by Tollemache, Yuri and Liu climbed the steps.

Yuri paused by the door frame. The hull’s skin was covered by a layer of anti-impact cladding that still bore UN and ISF logos, and warning signs about fuel loading and electrics. The cladding itself was yellowed and had suffered a multitude of little holes, like insect boring. This was a human-made thing that had travelled between the stars. And now here it was, buried in the jungle of an alien world. Sometimes Yuri really did feel like a man out of his time.

And Mardina and Beth came hurrying along a short corridor to the doorway to meet them, Beth wide-eyed and grinning. “Wow, Dad! Look what we found!”

“Wait until I tell you what we found…”

But Tollemache was waiting behind them. “Move it, shithead.”

Yuri just laughed. Tollemache had got noticeably more irritable since Yuri and Liu had found him on the way back, and told him all about the hatch—a spectacular discovery within walking distance, that might even have been his ticket off the planet, years ago, that he’d entirely missed. No wonder he was sore. Yuri moved on, following Liu and the others through the door.

Inside, the hull was brightly lit by fluorescents, a soulless glow that Yuri remembered too well from the years of his interstellar flight. And, when they got the door shut, it quickly turned cool, cool enough that Beth was soon shivering.

They were led to a kind of central hall where a table was set with three chairs. An older man in an ISF uniform was hastily dragging in more stackable chairs from a store. “Welcome,” he said. “My name’s Brady; the rank’s lieutenant.”

“Same as mine,” Mardina said.

“I know, Lieutenant Jones. I remember you. My promotion is more recent.”

Mardina glanced at Yuri and raised her eyebrows. More recent?

The rover driver walked in through another door. It was the first time Yuri had seen the man without a pane of glass standing between them.

“And this is Major Keller,” Brady said. “Jay Keller. Another recent promotion.”

Keller was about fifty, Brady maybe sixty, Yuri thought. Their uniforms were spruce enough.

They all stood around, uncertain. This big chamber inside the hull was like a brightly lit hall, with its curving ceiling overhead, spotlessly clean. It had evidently been refitted since its years in space. Mesh partition panels had been repositioned to give a flat floor with storage space beneath. Yuri could see bunks in screened-off areas, what looked like a galley, a comms console, maybe a science bay. A huge black screen dominated one whole area, with sofas drawn up before it. The fans and pumps of the air conditioning hummed, busy. They were inside a vast, shiny machine, just as if they were in space again.

In this setting the six travellers, covered in mud and wearing clothes made of bark, looked like chunks of the jungle. Beth was staring around, the fluorescents reflected in her eyes.

And Keller and Brady were staring at her, in her skimpy jungle-heat clothing.

“My daughter,” said Yuri.

“And mine,” Mardina said heavily.

Keller and Brady glanced at each other, looked away.

Beth seemed oblivious to this. “I thought that truck was something. But this…”

Mardina hugged her. “Welcome to my world, sugar.”

Brady moved, breaking the tension. “Please. Sit. You can imagine we don’t get too many guests.”

Tollemache grunted. “These fuckers aren’t guests.” He shucked off his ice-filled coat and pulled opened his uniform jacket. His corpulent face bore a ragged layer of grey-white stubble. “They’re illegals, remember. They were supposed to stay where we put ’em. They shouldn’t be here at all.”

Brady smiled. “Yeah, well, Parry, Sanchez, Britten and Sen should have stayed put too, and they’re long gone. Come on, Tollemache. After all this time we’re all just human beings together on an alien world, right?”

Tollemache just shook his head, walking away. “Christ, I need a shit.”

“Sit, please,” Brady said again. “You’d like something to drink? We have orange juice—”

He got no further than that. “Orange juice?” said Liu. “You have orange juice?”

Keller and Brady hastily laid on a kind of breakfast, of oats with milk, something convincingly like bacon, toast, orange juice, and coffee.

Mardina fell on the coffee, drinking cup after cup. “I never knew falling off the wagon could feel so good.”

Liu ate until, he said, his gut ached. Beth just nibbled; the food seemed to be too rich for her.

“I’m guessing this stuff doesn’t come out of an iron cow,” Liu said.

“Oh, we have all that,” Keller said. “But we were left with a mass of supplies, and the recycling still works pretty well. The system was meant to support eight; even now there’s more than enough for three.”

Mardina frowned. “Eight?”

“Four men, four women,” Tollemache said, emerging from a bathroom, zipping his fly. “The women left in year seven.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Mardina murmured, looking away from him.

“Just drove off into the fucking jungle in one of the rovers. Never heard from them again. Probably long dead, all of them. That left four of us.”

“Cancer got Whitstable,” Keller said. “Maybe you remember him, Lieutenant?”

Mardina shrugged.

Delga grinned. “I heard from your buddy here that you volunteered for this, right? You actually trusted ISF to come back for you.”

“There was going to be a bonus,” Brady said. “Promotions.”

“Well, at least you got those, it sounds like,” Liu said, laughing now. “What, did the chief of the ISF itself call you up from four light years away?”

“And all the time,” Mardina said, “you were surveilling us. The colonists.”

“Well, we tried. You would keep moving around, all of you…”

Mardina said, “We were told we were on our own here, on Per Ardua.”

Tollemache said stonily, “The planet’s called Prox c.”

“We were told there was no ISF presence. We were told there would be no resupply, no visit, not for a century.”

“Well, they would tell you that,” Brady said. “To get you to perform the way they wanted you to perform. Making babies, and filling Prox c with little UN citizens before the Chinese get here.”

“Yeah,” Mardina said bitterly. “Just like they told you what you wanted to hear. To get you to perform.”

Brady stiffened. “I think we’ve maintained our morale pretty well in the circumstances.”

“We make our reports,” Keller said. “Monthly, more often if something comes up. The science guys back on Earth are interested in the variable star winter going on just now.”

“And we get responses,” Brady said. “I mean, there’s a four-year each-way light delay, but we do get responses.”

Liu grinned. “And so you put on your uniforms and you act like good boys before the cameras, for the bosses that abandoned you. Because maybe good boys will get picked up after all. Right?

“In fact our log shows—”

“I bet it doesn’t show what goes on in the dark,” Delga said. “When you put these big floodlights out, and crawl into your bunks. We all need comfort.”

“Shut up,” said Brady.

Delga said, her voice a slithery hiss, “Which one of you’s the bitch?”

Suddenly Tollemache was at her back. He wrapped his big arm around her throat, and squeezed. Somehow, though she clearly couldn’t breathe, Delga kept smiling.

“Let her go, Peacekeeper,” Liu said.

“Just remember,” Tollemache hissed in Delga’s ear, “we’re the ones with the guns. Never forget it.” And he released her.

She slumped forward, coughing. Beth ran to her, and rubbed her back to help her breathe.

Cautiously they sat at the table once again. “So,” Liu said, “all these years you’ve sat in this tin can. When all the time you’ve got the discovery of the century sitting in the jungle an hour’s walk away.”

Brady frowned. “What’s he talking about?”

And Yuri told them about the hatch.

Chapter 56

They rested for a couple of hours. They ate more ISF food.

They took showers, their first since being bundled out of the Ad Astra all those years ago. Mardina seemed to love it. Yuri couldn’t stand the stink of the soap. Beth hated it, evidently, hated being in this box of metal and fake light. Yuri felt a twinge of sadness that she’d probably never learn to enjoy the Earthside advanced-civilisation-type luxuries he and her mother had grown up with; she could never be pampered. But then she had her own pleasures, her own place, here on Per Ardua.

Then, none of them ready for sleep, they formed up a party to go and take another look at the hatch. What else could they do?

Tollemache said he would lead. Yuri guessed he wanted to compensate somehow for letting him and Liu Tao run ahead earlier, and make “his” discovery for him. Yuri would go along, one of the two original discoverers, to be sure they found the way back. Mardina wanted to take a turn to go and see. And Beth was coming, Mardina was firm about that; she had seen the looks passing between these strange, obsessive old crewmen in their rusty hull in the jungle, and she wasn’t about to let her daughter out of her sight for a second.

They would take the ColU too. Yuri argued that the ColU’s translation skills with the builders could be vital; after all it was the builders that had led him and Liu to the hatch in the first place.

Tollemache accepted, but with bad grace. “Translation? That thing is designed to eat grass and shit out burgers, period. And the fucking woodies are just fucking woodies. What the hell has been going on with you people out there?”

Tollemache drove the party in the ISF rover, guided by Yuri, with Beth and Mardina on board. He smashed flat the undergrowth, even battering down a few mature trees, to leave a way open for the ColU which rolled complacently behind.

For Yuri, it was almost comfortable to get out of the hull and to breathe the dense, wet, warm, heavily scented air of Per Ardua again. It wasn’t as if he was at home out here, not exactly. But more so than being back in the carcass of what, for him, had been a prison ship.

At the site Tollemache parked up, and they walked into the clearing. The ColU rolled quietly after them, sensor pod extended, studying the ground.

The hatch, set in its panel in the clearing, was just as they had left it.

Tollemache wore his ice-filled outer suit once more, and he had a kind of camera unit on his shoulder and a science sensor pack in one hand, with links back to the hull base. “For the official record,” he said.

Mardina snorted. “Or so you can claim the official credit.”

Yuri would have led the way forward, but Mardina touched his arm, prompting him to let Beth go ahead.

Beth walked alone into the brighter light of the clearing, without apparent fear. She stood over the hatch itself, staring around, gazing at the cover of the hatch with its curious trefoil-groove starburst markings. There was a breeze, hot and clammy; it ruffled her short-cut hair.

“I have no idea what’s going on in her head,” Yuri murmured to Mardina. “She’s been exposed to so much newness, all in a rush. How can she possibly take it all in? It must be knocking her world to pieces.”

“She’s been on the road all her life,” Mardina said. “It’s all been new to her. Just as it has for us. I think she’s going to be fine. And look…”

Almost shyly, builders were emerging from the forest fringe, around the hatch. One by one they skirted the hatch itself, and clambered with cautious pirouettes over the mounds of dirt created earlier by their rough digging-out of the hatch. Yuri counted seven, eight, nine of them. And the builders came up to Beth, spinning, shaking their stem limbs—dance-talking, in the builders’ characteristic way. Beth responded in the way she’d grown up learning instinctively, with simple steps and spins that echoed messages of friendliness and welcome.

Tollemache was recording all this. He shook his head. “Now I’ve seen everything.”

Yuri ignored him. “ColU, you got anything?”

The ColU was passing a sensor pod back and forth over the ground surface on the end of its long manipulator arm, like a heavy lure on a fishing rod. “There is evidence of extensive working in the surrounding area, Yuri Eden. It shows up clearly in my geophysical surveys, in a variety of ways, though invisible to the naked eye. As you see, the structure you call the ‘hatch’ is embedded in a wider sheet of… a metal I cannot identify, some alloy. Ask Beth Eden Jones to stamp.”

“What?”

“Ask her to stamp her foot. It is a simple request.”

Yuri was baffled, but Mardina impatiently passed on the request.

Beth looked puzzled too, but she stepped out onto the grey, gleaming surface, cautious in her bark sandals. “It’s not slippery,” she said, testing it by sliding her foot. “Although it looks sheer.” She raised her right foot and stamped, once, twice. Then she jumped up and down, slamming her feet back down on the surface. To her delight, the builders copied her, flexing their big support stems to leap up and clatter down like wooden toys.

“Thank you,” the ColU murmured. “I now have sonic and seismic data. Yuri Eden, the hatch, and the structure in which it is embedded, is not thick. A couple of centimetres, no more. And beneath it I can detect nothing. I mean, no cavities in the ground.”

Mardina looked baffled. “So what does that mean? No alien treasure chamber?” she said.

“Evidently not.”

“Then what is it all for?”

“That remains to be determined… I told you there are extensive traces of workings in the ground here, all around the panel of which the hatch is the centrepiece, and in the ground further out. Very ancient traces, I should add. Little more than stains in the dirt, discolorations.” The sensor pod brushed the ground, as if licking it, and returned all but invisible samples to an open flap in the ColU’s hull. “And I find traces of the local photosynthetic chemistry, but heavily modified.”

“Engineered?”

“I believe so. As if there was once an extensive sun-catcher plant here. Well, this substellar point is a logical site for such a plant, as the region receives the highest intensity of Proxima light. But there is evidence of other workings here, much more advanced. Traces of structures. Disturbances where foundations were laid. Holes that once took posts. I can infer what was built here, once. I could produce graphical reconstructions with a slate, or—”

“Just tell us.”

“The structures are like builder middens and storm shelters, but on a variety of scales, various detailed forms. Much more massively built. And there are other features—narrow lanes of compressed earth that must have been trackways, wide enough to allow a builder to pass. In the soil too I have found traces of advanced engineering. Compounds, chemical, metallic, some I can’t immediately identify. Also traces of radioactivity in the past, or at least of a high radiation environment. High energies, too; there are traces of heavy elements in the ground here I have seen nowhere else on the planet. All of this has a triple-symmetry layout which—”

“Builders,” Mardina said. “I don’t get it. We’ve seen the builders, all the way back to the shuttle landing site. We’ve watched them. They use tools, they manage their projects. They moved the damn jilla halfway across the planet. But they only have stone tools. They use bits of their own bodies to build dams. They’re more like beavers than human engineers… Aren’t they?”

The ColU said, “This working was more elaborate and on a much grander scale than anything we’ve seen of their activities before. And much more advanced, of course. But the signature of the builder body form is everywhere.”

“OK, ColU, I believe you.” Yuri looked around, trying to imagine it. “So here was some kind of community of builders. They built a sun-catcher plant, and other facilities, with a technology far in advance of anything they have now. This was so long ago that barely anything remains of their work here. Civilisation fell, right?”

“I would not jump to conclusions,” the ColU said.

“They were gathering stellar energy. To do what?”

“To make something even more exotic,” Mardina guessed.

“Yes,” said the ColU. “Obviously you have the evidence in front of you, in the shape of the hatch, exotic compounds in the soil. It is strange, to just find this one site. Granted we have hardly surveyed the planet comprehensively, but you would imagine that a high-technology culture would have left traces of their passing everywhere, not just this one installation…”

Tollemache grunted. “Wait until they get some real scientists down here, and then you might get some decent answers. Not from this glorified tractor.”

The ColU dropped its sensor pod towards the ground, as if bowing in submission. “I can’t argue with that, Colonel. I am not equipped for this manner of work, not in a specialised way.”

Now Beth spoke, for the first time since arriving here. “What, are you saying we should wait around for eight years, and grow old and probably, like, die before anybody does anything about this?”

Yuri had to smile. “So what would you suggest?”

Beth gestured. “We open the hatch, obviously.”

Mardina said, “But there’s two problems with that, honey. One is that it doesn’t lead anywhere. You heard what the ColU said. There’s nothing underneath.”

Yuri said, “Maybe, but she’s right. This is obviously a hatch. What do you do with a hatch, but open it?”

“OK,” said Mardina with strained patience, “but that raises my second problem. How do we open it? Do you see anything like a handle? A wheel to turn, a combination lock to try?”

“Yes,” Beth snapped immediately. She walked onto the hatch, to one of the starburst indentations. “Look at these grooves. Three of them, each, what, a bit less than a metre long? And this fat indentation in the centre. Can’t you see what they’re for? Look, suppose I was a builder…”

And she lay down on her back over one of the groove sets, with her arms held out at two o’clock and ten o’clock, and her legs together at six o’clock.

“Shit, she’s right,” Tollemache murmured.

“These little cuttings are meant to hold builders,” Beth said. “Count them. Nine cuttings in this surface, all inside the seam. You think it’s a coincidence that nine builders showed up here today? They know what to do. We just have to get out of the way.”

“Wait,” Mardina said. She walked forward, as if trying to block the builders off. “Are we sure we want to do this? We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. We don’t know what danger this represents.”

Tollemache took a step backwards. “That’s true. Your tractor over there talked about huge energies being deployed. What if it’s a bomb? A booby trap of some kind?”

Yuri sneered. “Who would build a booby trap like this, and leave it in the ground for centuries?”

The ColU said, “The structure is many orders of magnitude older than mere centuries, Yuri Eden.”

“Not a bomb,” Mardina said. “Something else. Something stranger. My head’s swimming, Yuri. Strangeness upon strangeness. This thing was intentionally left here by somebody, builders or not, for some purpose. We’ve no idea what that purpose was. We’ve got no reason to believe it’s likely to be in any way in our interest. We shouldn’t even be here. Humans on this planet, I mean.”

Beth walked up and took her hands. “Mom. You’re freaking me out. But you need to stop protecting me. I’m twenty years old. I can make my own decision.”

Yuri felt an echo of Mardina’s alarm, but he said, “So what is your decision?”

“We open the hatch. Of course we open it. Anything else is going to drive me crazy, for the rest of my life!”

Tollemache cackled. “You’re outvoted, I’d say, Jones.”

“Well, we all are,” said the ColU, untroubled.

“Who by?”

“The builders.”

And Yuri saw that the nine builders were already making their way towards the hatch cover, and their engraved beds. They moved in the usual builder way, spinning and clattering, like eerie stringless puppets, but their motions were purposeful, even coordinated, as if each one seemed to know which of the shallow cuttings to pick. Quietly, the nine of them settled into the engraved slots. Which, as Yuri saw, as Beth had first noticed, fit them perfectly.

The ground under their feet shuddered, as if some vast engine had been woken.

And puffs of dirt rose up from the circular seam around the hatch.

Chapter 57

Mardina grabbed Beth and Yuri by the hand and pulled them away. “Back,” she said. “You too, ColU.” She ignored Tollemache, but Yuri saw that the Peacekeeper was stepping back too, keeping his sensor pack trained on the hatch.

And then, with a deeper shudder in the earth, the hatch lifted. It tipped up, as if it was hinged at a point to Yuri’s left, opening like a lid, slow, ponderous. The builders, evidently living keys in the hatch’s multiple lock, stayed motionless, held in position somehow so they did not fall, even as the hatch approached the vertical. The hatch’s position obscured Yuri’s view of whatever lay beneath the lid, but he saw that light poured out, a pale, pearly glow that underlit the branches of the nearby trees. And he felt a gush of cooler air, coming from beneath the hatch.

Somewhere a kite took off, startled.

When the hatch was vertical, it stopped moving. It was a tremendous, evidently massive disc, resting on its edge, invisibly hinged.

Tollemache, his recorder pack held before him like a weapon, was the first to walk forward. The brilliant light from the ground underlit his jowly face. “Holy shit,” he said. “You’d better come and see this. Step carefully now.”

The rest walked around the open lid. Beth asked, “Carefully in case of what?”

“In case you fall in.”

Somehow it was no surprise at all for Yuri to discover that beneath the opened hatch was a pit, a simple cylinder with plain walls and a flat floor, perhaps four metres deep. The light came from no particular source; rather the walls and floor all glowed with that grey-white light. One part of the wall was broken by what was evidently another hatch, a fine circular seam, with a set of groove-locks to hold just three builders this time. On the wall opposite that was some kind of adornment, what looked like a tapestry made out of stem-bark cloth.

And it didn’t surprise him either that three of the builders now hopped out of their grooves on the hatch and swarmed down into the pit, clinging somehow to the sheer walls. Once down they began to spin and turn on the floor, joyously.

The ColU cautiously extended its sensor pack. The four humans peered down, their faces lit from below.

“It’s real, then,” Mardina said. “I mean, it’s a real hole in the ground, not some kind of visual trick. Given that the builders have climbed down inside it.”

“Impossible,” said the ColU flatly. “My geophysical results were conclusive. There is no hole here. There cannot be.”

“Yet here it is,” Yuri said.

“Maybe I didn’t stamp hard enough,” Beth said mischievously.

“No, it wasn’t that. My analysis—”

“I’m teasing you!”

Yuri said, “We’ll have trouble climbing back up from that.”

“I got a ladder in the rover.” Tollemache went to fetch it.

“Hold on,” Mardina said. “Just hold on. Climbing back up? Are you seriously intending to climb down there? Into that impossible hole?”

Beth looked at her mother. “Sure. What else?”

“It should be safe enough,” the ColU said.

Mardina turned on it. “What? What? Are you serious? How can you possibly say that?”

The ColU stayed calm. “Evidently we are dealing with some distortion of space and time. There may be some kind of machinery in the mouth of the pit—exotic matter of some kind, perhaps, or a tremendous gravitational engine. But the builders passed safely through the opening. If there are any hazards, tidal effects perhaps, they are evidently gentle enough—”

“Give me that ladder.” Beth took it from Tollemache and dropped it into the hole. It passed through the hatch opening as easily as the builders had, Yuri noticed. Then she began to clamber down.

Tollemache watched her admiringly. He murmured to Yuri, “I will never know how something as piss-poor as you, ice boy, produced something as lush as that.”

“Fuck you,” Mardina said simply, her voice taut with anxiety.

On the pit floor, Beth stepped back from the ladder, looked up, spread her arms, turned around. The builders spun around her, their stem limbs making soft scraping noises on the sheer surfaces. She called, “Look at me. Safe as I ever was. Are you coming down, or not?”

Mardina remained cautious. She made her daughter climb back out first, just to ensure that it was possible, that they weren’t dealing with some kind of one-way trap.

Then Tollemache was the first to follow Beth back into the hole. “Me next. I’m not missing out on this.” He made sure his camera pack followed his own progress down the ladder. “Just like Dexter Cole. One small step for a man, like he said. Or was that Cao Xi on Mars?”

Beth blew a raspberry into his camera.

Mardina and Yuri exchanged glances. “I’ll go,” said Yuri. “You wait.”

“No way. I’m not letting Beth out of reach.”

“Well, I’m not letting the two of you go anywhere without me.”

“We can’t both go. Somebody ought to stay up top, in case—”

The ColU said gravely, “I can call for help if there is trouble. I can even block the lid if it descends, perhaps. This is a human adventure, Lieutenant Jones, Yuri Eden. Perhaps in some ways it is why humans have come to this world.”

Mardina frowned. “What does that mean? Oh, the hell with it.” She went down the ladder.

Yuri patted the ColU’s battered hull. “See you later, buddy.”

As he climbed down the ladder in his turn, he felt nothing as he entered the pit, passing from the world of the real into the realm of the impossible. No tugging, no tide effects, no shift of perception.

At the bottom, he was just in some smooth-walled hole in the ground, with the three others. They looked at each other, then stared around. There was plenty of room for them all, and the spinning, darting builders. Up above Yuri saw the cloudy sky of Per Ardua’s substellar point, with a fringe of foliage, and the ColU’s sensor pod held out over them all, quietly watching, recording.

Mardina passed her hands over the wall surface. The glowing light shadowed the bones within the flesh. “It feels slick, frictionless.”

Beth was inspecting the tapestry on the wall. “This looks like it’s stuck on with stem marrow.”

Yuri, Mardina and Beth stood together before the object. Maybe a half-metre square, it was made of some kind of fine-woven stem-bark cloth held open by a frame of four neat stems, which looked the right size once to have been builder limbs. It bore an image of a disc, washes of brown and blue-grey, hanging before a watery blue sky, all marked in some kind of pigment. If you looked more closely there was a great deal of detail, a furry fringe at the perimeter of the circle, a dense grey navel at the very centre, and fine blue threads that crisscrossed the disc, linking at dense nodes. The threads reminded Yuri of a chart of great-circle airline routes.

“It is a map, isn’t it?” Beth asked. “Just as it looks.”

Yuri shrugged. “What else can it be?”

“A map of the whole world,” Mardina said, wondering. “Just like we’d draw. The world as seen from space, from Proxima. There’s the substellar point at the centre. There’s the fringe forest. Look at that big bay cutting into the main continent—in the west? Builders made this.”

Yuri hesitated. “I’ve never seen a builder make a map. But they know their way around the landscape, we know that.”

Beth seemed defensive of the builders. “The ColU seems to think they built this whole place.”

“Hmm,” Mardina said. “But this map’s a lot cruder. And it’s just stuck on the wall.”

Yuri said, “So the builders once made high-tech installations, like this, with radioactivity and heavy elements, and other shit. Then, later, all they could make was a map to stick on the wall. And now all they can do is spin around keeping the mud off—if we let them.”

Beth looked troubled. “What does it all mean, Dad?”

“Damned if I know, sweetie.”

“I wonder how old it is,” Mardina said. “The map. Maybe we could tell if it’s drawn accurately enough, from continental drift, or something.”

“That takes millions of years to make a difference. This can’t be that old… can it?”

Mardina shrugged. “All the ColU could find of some kind of advanced industrial installation outside was a few scrapings of polluted dirt. It would take a fusion plant, say, a long time to break down that far.”

Beth traced the mesh of lines that overlaid the map of the world. “What are these?”

“They look like canals,” Yuri said. “They make Per Ardua look like Mars was supposed to be.”

Neither of them knew what he was talking about. Before their time.

“The builders don’t do canals,” Mardina said.

“Not that we’ve seen. But they do a lot of water management. They move lakes.”

“Nothing on this scale. Why, some of these canals cross the heart of the continent—they have to be channelled through bedrock. If they had ever existed, they’d leave a trace, even if ice ages had come and gone across the face of this world. In the Ad Astra, we did make some surveys from orbit. We’d have seen canals. And on the ground, we walked a long way. We’d have noticed the things, we’d have had to cross them.”

“Then the map’s wrong.”

“Or maybe the map’s right,” said Beth. “And the world is wrong.”

Yuri stared at her. “That makes no sense. Does it?”

“There’s something else you’re missing,” Tollemache called.

They looked over. The three builders had shimmied up the frictionless walls and were inserting themselves into the three sets of grooved “key” beds in the hatch in the wall.

“The second hatch,” Yuri said. “Shit. I forgot. And these builders are about to open it. Here’s another of those choice points. Do we go on, or go back?”

Mardina said tensely, “I was trained up as an astronaut. And one thing that was driven home to us was that you don’t go opening hatches just because they’re there.”

“Well, we’re not in space, Mom,” Beth said.

The three builders were settling into their positions.

“Last chance to run,” Tollemache said.

None of them moved. The decision made itself. Mardina grabbed Yuri’s and Beth’s hands. Tollemache seemed to brace himself.

With a soft sigh, the hatch in the wall swung away, taking the spread-eagled builders with it.

Chapter 58

The chamber beyond the wall hatch was almost an anticlimax. It seemed to be a copy of the room they were leaving, another cylinder a few metres across, though with a closed roof just as seamlessly joined to the walls as the floor, and similarly glowing with a sourceless mother-of-pearl light. But there was yet another hatch on the far side of the room, once again engraved with builder-body lock grooves.

The three builders leapt through the second hatch and spun around the floor, joyful once more, as if glad to be back here.

The humans walked through, one by one, led by Beth. Mardina brought up the rear. Yuri looked at his group. Beth was full of wonder. Tollemache, heavy in his ice coat in a room that seemed distinctly cooler than the world outside, seemed greedy for discovery. Mardina remained the most cautious, yet she had come through with the rest.

Yuri grabbed her hand. “It’s OK.”

“Is it?”

“We’re all together.”

“It’s just my training, I guess. I keep expecting something to happen—”

“Mom! The door!”

Yuri turned, too late, to see the hatch behind them swing closed, sealing itself neatly.

“Like that,” Mardina said angrily. “I keep expecting something like that to happen.”

Yuri’s first reaction, oddly, was to think of the ColU, suddenly shut off.

“So we’re stuck,” Tollemache said. “We’re fucking stuck.”

“Don’t swear at me, you ass,” Mardina said. “You could have stayed out there. You could have blocked the hatch.”

“What with? Your husband’s head?”

“Well, he’s not my husband. Nice idea however…”

Things started happening quickly. The builders had scuttled over to the hatch in the far wall, and were already settling into place in their grooves.

And Beth went back to the previous hatch and ran her hands over its surface. “Mom. Dad. Stop arguing. You’re missing it again.”

“What?” Yuri snapped.

“What’s important. Look at these.”

She had found indentations on the inner surface of the closed hatch—not builder profiles this time, but the imprints of human hands, three sets of them.

“I will swear,” Tollemache said heavily, “on your mother’s grave, ice boy, that those shapes were not there a minute ago.”

Yuri glanced across at the far door where the builders were almost settled in place. “But their meaning is obvious, isn’t it?”

“We do have a way back,” Mardina said.

“Yeah. Look, we have a choice. We can go back—if this door works as it looks like it will. Or—”

“We go on,” Beth said, grinning. “Come on. There’s no real choice, is there?”

Once again they waited until it was too late; once again the choice made itself. The builders settled into their slots, and the second wall hatch swung back, just like the first.

And it felt as if the floor fell away beneath them.

Chapter 59 2197

The Obelisk negotiations started late on Penny’s second day on Mars, to allow for the visitors’ misaligned biological clocks.

The talks were held in a panoramic conference room, on a floor of the Obelisk even higher than Penny’s hotel room. The main players sat at a long table, with the UN Deputy Secretary General and the chief Chinese official, a local provincial governor, facing each other across the centre of the table, with translators scattered around. Penny was here purely to advise Sir Michael King, so she sat back from the table just behind him, coming forward only when he beckoned her.

It seemed to Penny that the talks proceeded pretty well, on a broad-brush level. The delegates on both sides set out goals, aspirations, rather than demands or decrees. Visitors from UN nations should be allowed access to the Chinese offworld operations—especially the asteroid Ceres, the hub of development in the main belt, which was currently entirely closed to the UN. Similarly UN zone corporations should be granted licences to begin a share of exploitation of asteroid resources; after all, there was enough for everybody. On the other hand the Chinese wished for some kind of access to the kernels, at least to the wild developments in physics theory they had spawned, if not to the objects themselves. There were no blank refusals on either side, not yet.

Most of the discussion concerned matters of principle rather than details of the kernel science that was Penny’s speciality, and she had plenty of time to kick back and stare out of the window at the view. They were so high up that Mars’s tight horizon visibly curved, as if she was in some aircraft, not in a solid structure at all.

In a break, Penny stood with Sir Michael King and her assigned companion Jiang Youwei at a window, clutching coffees. King agreed that progress had been reasonable. “Here you have two societies with competing strategic goals, but with an almost entire lack of understanding of each other. A classic recipe for war, no matter how long we talk about zones of influence and such. But today, war is unthinkable.”

“Yes,” Jiang Youwei said seriously. “Both sides command enormous energies, the UN with its kernels, the Chinese with our interplanetary economy. Yet the populations of both sides are hugely fragile, we under our domes, the UN nations with their sprawling masses under an open sky—”

“Not to mention the sprawling masses in China itself,” King said sternly.

“Of course.”

“At the same time,” King said, “we each have a monopoly of something we don’t want the other guy to share. We the kernels, you the asteroids, roughly speaking. So what we’re each doing is prising open our treasure chests and letting each other at least sniff the gold. Everything is symbolic. The very fact that we made the effort to come all the way out here rather than just send a delegation to New Beijing on Earth is itself a token of our willingness to cooperate.”

He was right, of course. It was all about symbols, on a level beneath the torrents of words. Penny understood that as a “face” of kernel physics, internationally known, her presence too was a symbolic gesture. Even if she never opened her mouth.

Jiang said, straight-faced, “And of course your immense hulk ship in orbit around Mars is itself another symbol.”

King raised his eyebrows, and mock-toasted the boy’s answer with his coffee.

“Maybe free trade will be possible some day,” Penny said. “That’s generally a way to avoid war.”

King glanced at Jiang. “Maybe. But would your society, here on Mars for instance, be ‘free’ enough for that? What does freedom here actually mean for you?”

Jiang might have taken offence, Penny realised. In the formal talks both sides had shied away from any comment on the other’s political system. But, from what she had seen of the city of Obelisk, she was curious about this herself. “We never did have our conversation on that topic.”

Jiang merely nodded thoughtfully. “It is an interesting question. We of Chinese descent are products of a stable society now centuries old—”

King snorted disrespectfully. “All framed by a value system that goes back to Karl Marx and Chairman Mao.”

“But within any system, the challenges of ensuring freedom under conditions that pertain in an offworld colony—even here, in the largest offworld colony of all at the present time—are significant.”

“In our Western tradition the freedom of the individual is paramount.”

“Yes,” Jiang said, “as I understand from my own school studies. But even in your own offworld colonies the freedom of the individual must be curtailed, if the collective good is to be maintained. The problem is the fragility of the colonies. One cannot challenge the most repressive dictator, if that dictator is the only one who can control the air supply.

“We have philosophers exploring ways of ensuring individual freedom within a tightly constrained collective system. This is after all the condition under which most of mankind is likely to live for the foreseeable future. We reach back to old traditions; a citizen of the Roman Empire, for example, would have placed less value on individual liberty in the modern Western sense than on collective responsibility—a collective liberty, if you like. Actually it is a system-wide debate, for us. An ongoing participation for all our citizens, on Earth as well as offworld. Though we are not minded to follow your example, as evidenced at your Eden colony on Mars—I have been there myself—of excessive individual freedom kept in check by excessive policing.”

King laughed, and clapped his shoulder. “You got me there. Who’d want to live in a dump like that? Well, let’s hope these talks work out and we get to see a future where we can try out these experiments in liberty. Right, Colonel Kalinski? Colonel?”

But Penny had been distracted by a commotion. A door opened, and a harassed-looking official bustled in with a slate that he showed to the leading Chinese delegates. The news, whatever it was, spread quickly. Something about Mercury, she overheard them muttering, something extraordinary.

And then, it felt like, everybody in the room stared at Penny.

Chapter 60

They all staggered. Yuri and Mardina reached for each other, and for Beth. Tollemache backed up to a wall.

Beth clasped her stomach. For the first time in this whole episode she looked genuinely scared. Nearly in tears, she stumbled across to her mother, who held her tight. “Mom? What just happened?”

Tollemache said, “It feels like the elevator just went down.”

Mardina said, “Or the drive thrust just cut. But we’re not in a spacecraft.”

“Or,” Yuri said, “the gravity just weakened.” He bounced on his toes; he drifted back down slowly. What was this, about a third Earth-normal? Like Mars? He was distracted by motion he glimpsed through the open doorway. He walked that way, slow-motion swimming in the low gravity. Through the open hatch he saw another cylindrical chamber, a third, just like this second one, like the first. But though the walls glowed with that same eerie grey-white radiance, Yuri thought there was something different about the light in there. As if there was another source, shining from above.

A figure walked past the open hatch, back turned. A black costume, spangled with silver.

He looked wildly at Mardina. “That looked like—”

“An ISF uniform.”

“Then who the hell is that?”

“Only one way to find out.” Mardina led Beth across the floor and climbed through the doorway to the next chamber, and helped Beth through. Then Tollemache came, and finally Yuri.

This third chamber was another smooth-walled cylinder, just like the rest. A ladder had been attached somehow to the curving wall. Elsewhere on the wall small sensors had been fixed, anonymous white boxes, evidently human made. Yuri saw, glancing up, that some kind of translucent dome had been set up over the open pit, through which could be seen a roof of rock, as if they were stuck in some deep cavern.

That figure in the black and silver astronaut uniform, a woman, her back to the new arrivals, was working her way along the row of sensors, referring to a slate as she did so. Tall, blonde-haired, she was softly singing some tune about flying around the universe with her lover. She might have been in her fifties.

Beth turned to Yuri, grinning gleefully, thrilled at this new development, her low-gravity queasiness forgotten. She pointed at the woman’s back. Her meaning was clear. She doesn’t even know we’re here!

Mardina raised her eyebrows. Then, gently, she coughed.

The woman jumped, whirled like a Per Arduan builder, dropped her slate, and backed against the wall. “Holy shit. Who are you? And how did you get in here?”

Tollemache took charge. He strode forward, pointing his finger. “Never mind that, lady. Who are you? And how come I don’t know about you? This whole damn planet is full of illegals and stowaways.”

The astronaut shook her head, irritated, baffled. “What are you talking about? What planet?”

“Prox c.”

The astronaut stared at him. “Conan Tollemache!”

“What?”

“I knew I recognised you. Your face has been all over the news just recently. Peacekeeper Tollemache, right?”

“What’s it to you?”

The astronaut turned to the others, one by one. “Mardina Jones. Yuri Eden. Beth Eden Jones. All four of you. My God.”

Mardina glared at her, confused, disturbed. “What is this? What do you mean, the four of us? How do you know our names?”

“You’re the four who disappeared, into the hatch on Prox c, a few hours ago.” She frowned. “No. That is, given the time it took for the news to get here at lightspeed—four years ago, I’m guessing, by your time…”

They spoke at once.

“We didn’t disappear anywhere,” Mardina said.

“What do you mean, we disappeared on Prox c?” Yuri asked. “Where are we now, if not on Prox c?”

“Who are you?” Beth asked.

But Tollemache was the most insistent. He faced the young astronaut. “Four years ago. Bullshit.” He raised his ISF-issue chronometer, and brought up the date. “This is the date. 2193.”

“No.” Backing away from Tollemache, the woman bent to pick up her slate, and brought up a date of her own. “This is the date. 2197.”

Yuri could see it. If this astronaut wasn’t lying to them—and why the hell would she?—he had just jumped forward four years and a couple of months in time. Just like the cryo sleep.

“Not again,” he said.

The astronaut looked at him strangely. Then she smiled, competent, efficient, taking control, her training kicking in. “To answer your questions. Sir, my name is Stephanie Kalinski, Colonel, ISF. Good to meet you. And as to where you are, Ms Eden Jones,” she said to Beth, “welcome to the solar system. You’re on Mercury.”

Chapter 61

Penny tried to make sense of the news from Mercury. Refugees from another star, wandering out of the Hatch in the kernel layers? What could it possibly mean?

King growled, “Damn it. That cuckoo’s nest at the heart of the solar system is screwing us up again. And I’ve got to go back to Mercury to sort the bloody mess out.” He got up and left the room, without ceremony.

Penny, hastening to follow him, gathered up her stuff. The room was suddenly full of muttered conversation, hostile glares between renewed rivals. Penny had no diplomatic antennae to speak of, but the change in mood was obvious. She remembered Earthshine’s deep suspicion of the Hatch and the kernels and whoever was behind those mysteries on Mercury, and their malevolent effect on human affairs. Now here was another intervention of the same kind: another bizarre miracle on Mercury, perhaps, another gift from some unknown benefactor from which the Chinese were once more excluded.

She wondered what the hell had really happened on Mercury. And how come her sister was involved, as evidenced by the glares directed at her.

She looked for Jiang, seeking a way out of here.

Chapter 62

The astronaut, Colonel Stef Kalinski, shepherded the newly arrived Arduans out of the pit from the stars.

One by one they climbed the short fixed ladder. Yuri went first; it was easy in the low gravity. Once out of the pit Yuri looked back and saw an open cover, tipped up, just like the one he’d seen on Per Ardua. Remarkably, on the outside face of the lid there were not builder body-plan grooves, but indents to take human hands. And now he recalled the builders who had been their guides, so to speak, through the hatch from Per Ardua. He glanced down into the pit, past his companions, but the builders were nowhere to be seen; maybe they’d taken the chance to run back home, and he couldn’t blame them for that.

As soon as they were out Kalinski shepherded them through this rocky cavern to an elevator. It was a smooth but fast ride upwards. Kalinski, smiling, told them they were rising up through hundreds of kilometres. Yuri neither believed nor disbelieved that; he couldn’t take it in.

When they emerged from the elevator Yuri looked around, increasingly bewildered, trying to get his bearings. He found himself under a dome. Clear ceiling panels admitted the ferocious light of a sun above, which looked at least twice the size it had from Earth—not as big as the apparent size of Proxima from Per Ardua, but much, much brighter, even as seen through the evidently heavily filtered dome panels. He saw open doorways leading to transparent tunnels, no doubt connecting this dome to others on the surface. He knew the logic of this; it was just as he’d got used to on Mars, sealed up in the domes of Eden.

The dome itself was cluttered with white-box science and computing gear, and what looked like atmospheric control equipment of the kind he remembered from Mars. The interior seemed brilliantly clean to Yuri, even sterile, like a hospital. There was no need for artificial light under that huge lowering sun, but floods stood on tripods around the pit, into which cameras peered, presumably day and night. Colonel Kalinski, in her black-as-night astronaut uniform, was the only person here—her, and the four arrivals from Proxima Centauri.

Beth quailed from the brilliant sunlight overhead. And she threw up, suddenly, spewing the rich food she’d eaten in the substellar base half-digested onto the clean floor of the dome. Some kind of servo-robot, a more advanced model than Yuri had seen before, came scuttling out to scoop up the mess with quick vacuum sucks.

“I’m sorry,” Beth said, sounding distressed. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“That’s OK,” Kalinski said. “Do you need to clean up? We can give you fresh clothes from the stores, of course…” She hesitated, listening to a comms unit at her ear. “My administrators are scrambling to put together some kind of response to this situation. For a start I’m to drive you over to the hab domes. I’m sorry to be disorganised, we’re not prepared for this, as you can imagine.” Her accent sounded vaguely American, Yuri thought, but with a twang he couldn’t quite place.

Mardina said, “This must be strange for you too.”

“Kind of. But the Hatch is the reason I’m here, on Mercury. I’m a theoretical physicist. Since the Hatch was uncovered, I’ve seen a lot of strangeness. Believe me, you four walking through from Proxima doesn’t even top the list.” She grinned, somewhat ruefully, Yuri thought. “But I’m sure glad I was here to see this, to see you arrive. Once I saw the images of your Hatch on Prox c, matching the one here on Mercury, I knew it had to be something like this.”

Yuri frowned. “Like what?”

“A lightspeed transit system. Like a subway. I mean, you got here at lightspeed, nearly, we established that already. A four-year transit time. With no subjective time lag at all—am I right?”

“A lightspeed subway?” Yuri asked. “Built by who? And why?”

Beth said now, “And I show up in the middle of this cosmic wonder and throw up all over it.”

Kalinski laughed and took Beth’s hand. “Don’t worry about it. Somehow it seems appropriate… You know, Beth Eden Jones, you’re the first human born on Proxima c to have returned to Earth. Think of that.”

Mardina grunted. “She’ll be famous.”

“For better or worse, I think that’s true.”

Tollemache seemed to like the idea of that. “Famous, eh?”

“Oh, yes. The images you sent back of the Hatch twin on Proxima c have been a sensation.”

Tollemache hefted his sensor pack. “Images taken with this very pack. Look, I need to speak to people.” He thought it over. “My superior officers. Hell, an agent—”

Kalinski held up her hand, and pulled her chiming slate from her belt. “I’m sorry, sir, we’ll have to talk later. I’ll escort you to the rover, and then to Dome Z where we’ll all go through decon.”

Mardina raised her eyebrows. “Decontamination?”

“Well, yes. This whole dome is a secure environment. It has been since the Hatch was discovered. We’re dealing with an alien artefact here—or at least that’s the best guess we have—with unknown properties. Every time I come out of here, or my twin—”

Beth looked interested. “Twin?”

“Long story. I have to go through decon too. And now you’re here, and who knows what little passengers you’ll have brought back from Proxima c with you? Then, I’m afraid, you’re going to face a barrage of questions, tests, by doctors, physicists… Look, we’re making this up as we go along. You may be facing days of processing. I’m sorry.”

Tollemache grinned. “The price of fame. God, I’m looking forward to seeing Earth again.”

At least Yuri could tell what he was thinking. Mardina’s look was complicated, calculating; Yuri had no real idea what she had made of this strange turn of events.

And Beth, who had been born under the light of a distant star, who had grown up surrounded by an alien intelligence, who had walked fearlessly into an alien pit on Per Ardua, looked frankly terrified.

Chapter 63

Kalinski led them through an airlock directly into a rover, more or less of the kind Yuri was used to from Mars. Once they were all strapped in, Kalinski sat in the left-hand driver’s seat and murmured instructions to an onboard AI.

The rover pulled away from the dome and rolled off. As they did so Yuri glimpsed another rover heading back to the Hatch dome, faces peering through the windows. More scientists on the way in case of more arrivals, perhaps. And Peacekeepers, probably. That would be a characteristic response.

The ride was bumpy, on a road roughly cut through rocky terrain. The windows were very small and looked downward, so you could never see the horizon, let alone the sky with that huge baleful sun. But the light gleamed back painfully from exposed rock faces and the few human artefacts, way marks, signs, small science set-ups.

Kalinski turned to face her passengers. “I like to drive myself, generally. But I thought I’d better not take a chance with such a precious cargo.”

“Thanks,” Mardina said with a sneer.

“Oh, come on, Mom,” Beth said. “Colonel Kalinski’s being very kind to us.” She seemed to be over her partial-gravity nausea, and was looking around more brightly. “I can’t see much out of these funny little windows. Is that because of the sun?”

Kalinski said, “Yes… Do you know much about Mercury, Beth?”

“Does the sun stay in one place in the sky, like Per Ardua?”

Kalinski took the name on board. “Per Ardua. That’s Prox c. OK. No, Mercury has a day that’s two-thirds of its year. It’s to do with tidal resonances. As a result the sun kind of wanders around the sky, as seen from the ground, going west, then east. The whole pattern repeats every two Mercury years. Which is a hundred and seventy-six Earth days.”

Tollemache said, “From what I saw the sun is pretty high just here.”

“That’s right. We’re close to the equator, and it’s local noon—or midsummer. The biggest UN base is at the north pole, on the Boreas Planitia, where there are permanent shadows, ice. This is the Caloris basin. A giant impact crater. Which is why the ground is a broken-up jumble. It’s a difficult place to operate, and we wouldn’t have any kind of permanent base here at all, I guess, if it wasn’t for the kernel beds, and the Hatch being found here. It’s posed all kinds of technical challenges, working here.”

Yuri spotted movement on the desolate ground outside: what looked like tremendous cockroaches, with wide, iridescent wings. They were humans, some kind of astronauts, surface workers, in suits like segmented armour, in brilliant silver. Those wings spread wide from the back. As the rover approached, one of them stood straight and waved. No face was visible behind a golden dome of a helmet. Yuri, bemused, waved back.

Then there were flashes at the windows, brilliant enough to light up the whole interior of the rover. Beth recoiled, rubbing her eyes.

“Sorry.” Kalinski pressed a screen, and covers closed over the windows. “Camera flashes. I told you there’d been leaks. Your faces will be all over the inner system already. Those guys must be being paid well to risk the discipline charges.”

The rover slowed, and Yuri heard a dull impact on the opaque hull, some kind of docking. Within seconds the hatch opened again, leading to a brightly lit tunnel.

“Here we go,” Kalinski said. “Dome Z. I’ll be going through decon too, having been in contact with you, and the Hatch. We’ll have to strip, I’m afraid; your clothes will be cleaned and returned later. Men that way, women this, follow me…”

At the other end of the tunnel, Peacekeepers waited for them, in containment suits, heavily armed.

For Yuri and Tollemache, it took four days, of showers, heat baths, body fluid samples, full-body scans, tasteless meals, interrogations of various kinds, and periods of uneasy sleep, before the doctors finally slipped off their surgical masks and shook their hands. “It’s been a unique experience, gentlemen. Thank you.”

“Kiss my ass,” said Tollemache. “Where are my pants?”

As it turned out their clothes were not returned to them. For one thing the colonists’ scraps of stem-bark cloth were the first samples of Arduan life solar-system-based scientists had got their hands on directly, since the sparse samples returned by the Ad Astra years earlier. There were even anthropologists on hand, Yuri learned, eager to pore over the handicrafts of the emergent human communities of Proxima c.

Tollemache was given a fresh Peacekeeper uniform. Yuri noticed it was beefier than the old design, with toughened pads at shoulders, neck, elbows, knees, and a kind of utility belt with pouches and loops, ready for weapons. Evidently Peacekeeping in the modern solar system was a more dangerous game than it used to be. For his part, Yuri was handed an orange jumpsuit just like the kind he’d been issued with when he was first pulled out of the cryo tank on Mars. Some things didn’t change.

They were brought to a kind of lounge, with padded couches, a bar serving soft drinks and coffee, and a big picture window with a view of the battered surface of Mercury, shaded from the sun. Here at last they were reunited with Mardina and Beth, and Colonel Kalinski. Mardina was already devouring coffee, picking up where she’d left off at the Hub base on Per Ardua. She wore a smart astronaut uniform, black and silver. Beth, though, was in an orange jumpsuit like her father’s.

Beth hugged Yuri. But they pulled apart, uncertain, dressed up in strange clothes, even smelling wrong. Yuri forced a smile, uncertainly.

Yuri helped himself to a soda. It bubbled oddly in the low gravity; he’d never had a soda on Mars. “So, twenty-eight years after waking up on Mars—”

“Thirty-two,” Kalinski murmured. “You jumped another four years in the Hatch, remember.”

“Shit. Here I am back in a jumpsuit, like a convict.”

Beth came over and linked his arm. “Never mind, Dad. I’m a convict too.”

“Yeah. The difference is the uniform looks good on you.”

“And I still have this.” She stroked the tattoo that covered half her face. “They couldn’t scrub that off in their decon. But, you know, they offered to remove it for me there and then. Said I’d fit in better.”

“You’d ‘fit in’. Where?”

“Earth,” Mardina said bluntly.

Beth stroked her tattoo again. “I’m not from Earth. I’m from Per Ardua.”

“Quite right, honey,” and Yuri kissed her on the cheek. “We’ll work it out somehow.” He looked at Mardina in her ISF suit. “I’m surprised you let them dress you up in that thing. The ISF dumped you on Per Ardua.”

She looked at him steadily. “But I wasn’t born on Per Ardua. This was my career, Yuri. This is who I was, and am. I’m still an officer in the ISF, I’m told. Even though they haven’t figured out what rank I am; strictly speaking I was retired with honours when I was left behind at Proxima.”

Tollemache said, “There’s talk of back pay. You ought to chase that up, Jones. But we probably won’t need it, we’re all going to earn a fortune out of this.” He grinned, gulping down some kind of fruit drink. “What a break! I bet those assholes Brady and Keller will be sick as shit when they hear about this.” He mused, “In another four years’ time, I guess. Good. Give me time to milk it before sharing it with them.”

Yuri looked at him in disgust. “You really are a charmer, Tollemache.”

He just laughed. “You got to take your chances in this life.”

“Good point,” said a newcomer, a man, old, short, plump, bustling into the room. “That Hatch of yours, Peacekeeper Tollemache, could be a chance for all of us—an opportunity crucial to the future of two stellar systems, and to the whole destiny of mankind.” In his eighties maybe, he wore what looked like a business suit, with thin lapels, a kind of cravat, shiny fake-leather shoes. Behind him came another man, tall, grave, thin as a builder’s stem limb, in a well-cut astronaut uniform with officer stripes on his upper arm.

Kalinski stepped forward with a professional smile. “Good to see you, sir. I need to introduce you. This is Sir Michael King—”

This was the tubby businessman type. He winked at Kalinski. “Stef, your twin sends her regards.” Then he strode forward and shook all their hands; his grip was surprisingly firm, a worker’s handshake. “I’m president and CEO of Universal Engineering, Inc., the prime contractor with responsibility for developing the resources of Mercury on behalf of the nations and peoples of the UN.” He studied Yuri. “You’re the fella from the ice, right? Rip Van Winkle. What do you call yourself—Yuri Eden? Well, I’m the guy whose company built the ship that took you to Mars, and the Ad Astra that delivered you all the way to Proxima Centauri. What do you think of that?”

“Thanks,” Yuri said drily.

“And I just drove in from Mars on a hulk ship myself, once I heard the news about you people. This is my closest colleague on Mercury,” King said, indicating the tall man in the astronaut suit.

“Jim Laughlin, Colonel, ISF.” He shook hands in his turn. “Base commander, here in Caloris. You can see I’m an ISF officer, but I have a political reporting chain into the UN itself, ultimately to the Security Council.”

“My teammate,” King said. He threw mock boxing punches at Laughlin. “Or my sparring partner. We get on famously.”

Laughlin raised his eyebrows; evidently long-suffering, he said nothing.

King said, “Come. Sit. Have some more drinks. Colonel Kalinski, will you sort that out? You need something to eat?”

“They’ve been feeding us in the decon,” Mardina said.

“What, barium meals? Ha ha. Look, I know it’s tough, we appreciate all you’ve been through.”

Beth accepted a glass of water from Kalinski. “Sir Michael King?”

“Yes?”

“What do you want?”

Mardina burst out laughing. Even Laughlin suppressed an icy grin, Yuri saw.

King evidently had a sense of humour. He grinned, sat on a couch and faced the group. “Good question, young lady. Well, together with my colleague here, we run this place. We make the decisions that count. OK? We both have puppet-masters back on Earth, so does everybody, but here on the ground, we make the decisions. And at the end of the day we will have to make decisions—”

“About us,” said Tollemache.

“About the consequences of your emergence through the Hatch,” Laughlin said carefully, “and it was a shock as much for us as for you. It’s only been days. We’re still trying to digest the implications. Political, economic, social, technological, scientific. Although I have to say this kind of possibility, that the Hatches are some sort of transit system, was sketched in one of Colonel Kalinski’s papers.”

“Actually the paper was by my twin,” Stef Kalinski said stiffly.

“That has been some help. I’m sure Colonel Kalinski here will tell you all about the spectacular scientific possibilities.”

King put in, “But big cosmic questions are rather beyond my horizon, and that of my own political masters—and indeed the UEI shareholders. The first reaction from on high, and my comms systems have been buzzing since you arrived in this regard, concerns the potential utility of the thing. If, you see, we can walk through this—this lightspeed tunnel—from one star system to the next, think how we could use it. When we built and launched the Ad Astra, it strained the resources of the UN itself. We were determined to use our kernel technology to plant seeds on the habitable planet of Proxima before the Chinese could reach it. Well, we did it, but we exhausted ourselves. As for the Chinese, they couldn’t do it at all. Oh, they could probably send out some kind of slowboat, a big solar-sail junk. Take them decades to get there. Centuries even. Because, my friends, they don’t have access to what remains an exclusively UN resource: that is, the kernel mines here on Mercury, where we dug up the magical bits of physics that shot your ship off to the stars.”

“But you will see,” Laughlin said, “that the Hatch tunnel, if it can be proven to be safe, stable and so forth—”

“And if it’s two-way,” Kalinski said drily.

“The Hatch is a way to achieve the mass colonisation of the Proxima system much more rapidly.”

Mardina stared. “You can’t be serious.”

King grinned. “Never more so. All we have to do is ship ’em to Mercury, push ’em through the Hatch, and they’re in business.”

Kalinski shook her head. “But, Sir Michael—it’s just like the way you’ve been using the kernels since they were discovered. We don’t know how these things work. We don’t know what they’re for. And yet we’re digging them up and sticking them on the back of crewed spaceships. Now you have the Hatch, and it’s an obvious artefact of intelligence, but again we don’t know who put it there and what it’s for, let alone how it functions. Can’t you see we’re on the edge of some tremendous mystery here? A mystery into which mankind seems to be walking step by step, blindfold.”

A mystery—or a trap, Yuri wondered.

King seemed to take no notice of what Kalinski had said. “This, of course, only increases the political tensions surrounding Mercury itself. Suddenly this scrubby planet is even more valuable than before, when it was merely the exclusive source of the kernels. Now that it’s the gateway to Prox c too, Mercury will become the solar system’s prize asset beyond Earth itself, perhaps. That will lead to stresses which—”

Beth flared. “But Per Ardua isn’t some pawn in a game. Per Ardua—and that’s its name, by the way, not Prox c—is a world, with a history of its own, and native life, an ecology, even intelligent life.”

Laughlin murmured, “Good vocabulary. You’re evidently well educated, Ms Eden Jones. Your parents are to be congratulated.”

Beth just glared at him.

“There’s even a human history,” Tollemache said now, with relish. “Nearly thirty years of colonisation. Tales of abandonment, rape, murder and incest that would make your hair curl, gentlemen. And I watched it all.”

King ignored that, and waved away Beth’s point too. “We already encountered life on Mars, Titan, other places. We know how to handle it.”

Yuri goggled. “ ‘Handle’ it? As I recall from my time there, you’re blowing Mars up to terraform it. How is that ‘handling’ the local life?”

“That’s the Chinese, not us,” King pointed out. “I’m sure we’ll be more careful. There could be parks, for instance. Preserves.” He leaned forward. “In fact, you make a good point, Mr Eden, about the Chinese and their terraforming. We can say that’s why we don’t want to let them loose on Padre, uh…”

“Per Ardua.”

“Right. With their aquifer-breaking nuclear bombs. We need to get there first, and preserve it from those rapacious Chinese. We can fix up the language. And you four—and especially you, Ms Eden Jones—will be able to help us do just that.”

Yuri marvelled at the man’s flexibility of mind. He had to be making all this up on the spot, given how recent their irruption from the Hatch had been. Yet here he was spinning geopolitical strategies on the fly. There hadn’t been much opportunity for politicians to flourish on Per Ardua, or even in the UN enclosures on Mars, and Yuri couldn’t remember much of the Earth of his youth. King was in his element, evidently. Maybe he was the Gustave Klein of the inner system.

But Beth seemed baffled, perhaps alarmed.

Mardina took her daughter’s hand. “What do you mean, Beth’s going to help you? How?”

King glanced around at the clean, expansive lounge. “Believe me, it’s an oasis of calm in here. Out there it’s a shit storm, and it won’t pass for—oh, days. Until the next scandal comes along. And just now you four are hot properties. Especially you, Beth Eden Jones. Look at you, young, gorgeous, exotic—I’m loving that tattoo—and the first star child to return to the solar system.”

“ ‘Star child’?”

“Not my headline. We’ll get you back to Earth as soon as we can. There’ll be book offers, movie deals, a scramble for your image rights—you’re probably all over the media already, impersonated by clumsy AI avatars. You will be the human face of Prox c—I mean of Per Ardua. In the end, you may save it, single-handedly. If we handle it right.

“The rest of you too,” he said to the others, noticing Tollemache’s crestfallen expression, “will have opportunities. We just have to find the right angle. ‘My lonely vigil under Proxima’s red light’ for you, Peacekeeper, something like that.”

“Well, Proxima’s not red—”

“I know a few people. And of course, you can resume your ISF career, Lieutenant Jones.”

Mardina asked, “Are they serious about having me back, Colonel Laughlin? For genuine duties, not as some kind of poster figure.”

“I believe so. I can pass your request up the chain of command if that is your choice.”

King nodded, his heavy jowls compressing. “I’ll do my best to move that along too.”

Yuri realised that King and Laughlin weren’t meeting his eyes. “And me, Sir Michael? How will you take care of me?”

Beth looked shocked. As usual she immediately picked up on the implications of his tone. “Dad, what are you talking about? I’m not going to Earth if you’re not coming too.”

Mardina stroked her daughter’s hair. “Earth is our home, when all’s said and done, sweetheart.”

“Yours, maybe,” Yuri said. “But not mine. I’m a century out of time, remember?”

“What does that matter, Dad? I was born on another planet altogether. On a world of another star! As long as we’re all together, and we’re free—that’s where home is.”

Laughlin coughed. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Not in the case of Mr Eden…”

“I knew it,” Yuri said.

“The retrospective trials of the Heroic Generation, of which your parents were such prominent members, are continuing. Even after a century or more. And an increasingly assumed legal stance is the inheritance of punishment. That is, the right to punish heirs for the crimes of their parents or grandparents—”

Tollemache growled, “I hate the little shit, but even I can see that that’s unjust.”

King spread his hands. “It’s the mood of the times, Peacekeeper. Some of those heirs got very rich on the backs of their parents’ global crimes. This is the prosecution argument, you understand, not my own position necessarily. Why, because of gen-eng and illegal psych downloads and the like, it’s suspected that some of those heirs are members of the Heroic Generation, effectively. So you can see—”

“If I go back to Earth,” Yuri said flatly, “I won’t be free.”

“There’s no question of imprisonment,” Laughlin said. “Call it house arrest. Surveillance. Your movements will be monitored and curtailed, for as long as the legal process lasts.”

“I’ll be put on trial for some crime deemed to have been committed by long-dead parents who shoved me in an ice box for eighty years.”

“But that itself is an issue,” King said. “Some prosecutors would argue that your parents did that in precisely the hope you would thereby evade any legal process. And…”

Yuri stopped listening. So he would be surrounded by walls of plastic and metal, his every step watched by a suspicious mankind, for the rest of his life.

He closed his eyes. He remembered that day when the shuttle had landed, and he’d climbed down to the surface of Proxima c for the first time, and there were no fences, no dome walls, just an arid plain, and he had just run and run until he was out of sight of every other human being in the universe. He imagined running, like that, with Beth at his side. I may as well have been left on Mars.

“I’m going to Earth,” Mardina said flatly. “Yuri, I’m sorry. Whatever the implications for you. That’s where my life is, always was. And Beth is coming with me. She’ll have a better life, and a longer one, than she would as a baby factory on Per Ardua. You know it.”

Beth looked at her father in growing horror. “Dad?”

“I can’t follow you,” Yuri said softly. “No matter what the conditions. I wouldn’t survive.”

“Dad, no!” Beth would have come to him, but Mardina kept a firm hold on her arm.

They were all watching him now, Laughlin looking embarrassed, King with an assumed expression of sympathy, Colonel Kalinski with what looked like genuine shock and sorrow, even Tollemache showing a kind of gruff respect.

King spread his hands. “Then what will you do, Yuri Eden? Where will you go?”

“There is another option. To go back to the only place I’ve ever been free.”

“Dad—”

Laughlin leaned forward. “You’re going back through the Hatch?” He glanced at Kalinski. “Is that possible? Is it safe?”

“We don’t know, sir. We haven’t tried it yet.” She glanced at King. “Even though we’re dreaming up all these schemes about mass migration through it. I don’t see why not, however. In fact, Mr Eden, if you’re serious about this—”

“Yes?”

“I’ll come with you.”

King snorted. “Are you crazy? You’ll end up four light years from home. And, after another lightspeed hop, four more years in the future.”

“I know. I understand that. But there’s a scientific purpose, sir. Somebody’s got to be the first to try it—I mean in a planned, scientific manner. We need to know the link works, that it’s stable. And we need to know how it works. I mean, we’ve had this Hatch under surveillance for years, but we never had the courage, or the imagination, to take the next step, as you did, Yuri. To go through. Well, now’s the time. And who better but me?”

“She is an ISF officer,” Laughlin pointed out. “And the nearest we have to an expert to boot. Along with her sister, of course. This is all rather a rush—but it is a compelling case, Sir Michael.”

Tollemache shook his head. “I just don’t get it. You saw the images I sent back. Prox c is a shithole. And I can tell you these press-ganged colonists they’re talking about sending through are going to be the dregs of the megacities and the slums, scraped up and shovelled through, just like it’s been in Mars. Why would you go there voluntarily, a bright spark like you?”

Stef glanced at Yuri. “Personal reasons. Because it will be better for me there than here. Just like you, sir.”

For Yuri and his family, that was only the start of an argument that raged for days. But he knew Mardina; from the minute she said she was staying on Earth with Beth, and for all Beth’s tears, he had known that his family was lost. Dead to him. And soon to be cut off from him by a barrier of thick time, just as his parents had cut him off before.

He, however, was going home.

Chapter 64

Yuri and Stef Kalinski stood side by side in the chamber of the Hatch on Mercury. A handful of technicians stood around on the surface above, monitoring instruments, gazing down curiously.

Above Yuri’s head, the great lid was slowly closing.

None of their families were here. A month after they had all walked through the hatch from Prox, Beth and Mardina were already on Earth, Yuri had been told, and Kalinski’s twin was nowhere around. It was just the two of them,

Yuri looked over at Kalinski. They were both sealed up in heavy-duty Mercury-standard armoured spacesuits. Yuri had even been shown how to open the cockroach-type radiator wings. This time there was no question of them just wandering through the Hatch system without protection, as they had on Per Ardua; now no chance was being taken. He couldn’t see Kalinski’s face behind her gold-plated visor. Even now he didn’t feel he knew her too well. They had had, ironically, little time to talk since the decision had been made to send them through the Hatch. He said, “Last chance to climb out.”

“I’m fine, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir, for God’s sake. And no more goodbyes?”

“I feel like I already left.”

“Yeah. Me too. Kind of unusual for twins to split up, isn’t it?”

“We’re unusual twins. I’ll tell you about it some time.” She grinned. “And I guess there will be plenty of time. And—Beth?”

He was trying to put out of his head his last encounter with Beth. Neither of them had been able to speak for crying. “The last thing I told her was my true name.”

Kalinski stared at him.

He glanced up. By the light of the ferocious sun, the last few techs were just visible past the edge of the closing lid. One of them got down to her knees and waved. Yuri waved back.

And then the lid closed, silent, heavy, and that was that; they were shut off. The light in here, provided by the glowing walls, roof, floor, was bright enough, yet dimmed compared to the glow of the blocked-out sun.

Yuri glanced at Kalinski. “You OK?”

“Yes. You?”

“I wonder if we made the jump already. I mean in space. You think we’re already on Per Ardua?”

“Impossible to say,” Kalinski said. “But my feeling is that we make the transfer in the central bridging room, not these antechambers. It was in the central room you said you experienced a gravity shift.”

“Maybe. Who knows? Are you ready?”

“Sure.”

They had actually worked through the transition process in virtual simulations, real space-programme stuff. You just pressed your hands into the indentations in the inner doorways. Nobody knew if gloved hands would work, or if, as the indentations came in sets of three on each door, one or two or three people would be necessary to work them.

In the event, two pairs of hands seemed to work just fine. The door swung back.

Just another door, opening ahead of you, Yuri. Just another door, in a long line of doors.

They climbed through easily into the central chamber, and faced the second door, complete with its set of hand marks. They glanced at each other, shrugged, and lifted their hands. The door behind them swung closed.

And when they opened the door before them Yuri immediately stumbled, under heavier gravity. Per Ardua gravity. Was he already back? Had another four years already passed? If so, Beth was gone.

When he walked out of the middle chamber and climbed through the second hatch, Yuri found himself back in the Per Ardua chamber he remembered. The lid was closed; he couldn’t see the sky. But there was the builder map on the wall, at which Kalinski stared avidly. There was the ladder from Tollemache’s rover, presumably having stood here for more than eight years. There was even scattered mud on the floor, brought in from the surface by their boots, long dried. “Like I’ve never been away,” he said.

Kalinski leaned with one gloved hand on a wall. Yuri knew she’d been training to cope with Per Ardua’s full Earth-type gravity, but it was going to be hard for a while. “I’m relieved it worked. I thought it would, but—”

“I know. At least we’ve not been dropped in the heart of a sun, or something. I don’t think it works that way, this link system. It all seems too—sensible—for that, doesn’t it? Look, we’re not going to need these suits. What say we dump them?”

“I guess we could. There are no sim controllers to order us around now, are there?”

“Welcome to my world, Colonel Kalinski.”

They got out of their suits quickly; they were self-operating, self-opening. Underneath they both wore light, practical coveralls in Arduan pastel colours, and they had backpacks of survival gear and science monitors.

Yuri nodded at Kalinski, hefted his pack, and made his way up the ladder to the closed hatch lid. Braced on a rung, he pressed both hands into indentations in the lid—indentations which, he recalled, had not been there the last time he passed through, and the builder marks seemed to have vanished.

To his relief, the hatch opened smoothly.

He looked up at a dismal cloud-choked grey sky framed by dead-looking trees, and it was cold, he could feel it immediately, cutting through his thin coverall. He’d been gone for eight years, he reminded himself, four years as some kind of disembodied signal passing from Ardua to Mercury, and four years coming back again—even if it only felt like a month to him. Plenty of time for things to change.

He clambered out quickly, and stood on the Arduan ground once more. He watched Kalinski follow cautiously, slowly given the burden of the higher gravity, but her face was full of wonder, or astonishment. Her first moments on an alien world.

Standing together, they turned around. Much had indeed changed. The thick Hub forest still stood, but dead leaves hung limply from the stubby upper stem branches, the undergrowth had died back, and there was a huddle of dead builders, not a purposefully constructed midden but just a heap of corpses, on which, Yuri saw, frost had gathered. Frost, at the substellar. His breath fogged.

“Hello, Yuri Eden.”

Yuri turned. There was the ColU, its dome smeared with some kind of ash, its upper surfaces rimed with frost. Yuri felt oddly touched. “You waited for me.”

“Yes.”

“For eight years? Jesus. Looks like you stayed in the very same spot.”

“No. That would have been foolish. I moved periodically in order to ensure the smooth functioning of my drive mechanisms and—”

“All right, I get it. This is Stef Kalinski. Colonel in the ISF.”

“I know of you. Welcome, Colonel Kalinski.”

Kalinski just stared.

“Yuri Eden, you left Mercury four years ago. We received warning of your coming a short time ago, you and your companion.”

“Ah,” said Kalinski. “The message beat us, just as when you came through the other way, Yuri. The transit’s not quite lightspeed.”

“The message was received by Captain Jacob Keller in the hull, who informed me.”

Yuri asked, “Keller? What about Brady?”

“He has not survived. We keep each other company, Captain Jacob Keller and I. Sometimes we play poker.”

Yuri had to laugh. “Poker. My God. ColU, the weather—what happened here?”

“Volcanism, Yuri Eden. It seems that a major volcanic episode has occurred, probably in the northern region, from which we fled with the jilla and the builders.”

“Ah. All that uplifting.”

“Yes. It is not an uncommon occurrence on this world, it seems. That is, not uncommon on a geological timescale.”

“And now,” Kalinski said, “we’re in some kind of volcanic winter.”

“No doubt for the native life forms it is part of the natural cycle. A spur to evolution perhaps. But the humans here have suffered. Of course the star winter was already a challenge. All this has happened in the interval while you fled, dreamless, between the stars.”

“My God. If it’s as bad as this here, at the substellar… Where are they, Delga and the rest?”

“Gone from here, Yuri Eden.”

Yuri glanced around, at this utterly transformed wreck of a world, to which he had now been exiled by the mother of his child, as once he had been exiled to the future by his parents. He felt his heart harden, as he stood there in the unexpected cold. “OK. Well, there are big changes on the way, ColU. Floods of immigrants are going to be coming through that Hatch. I don’t imagine the UN will wait the eight years it will take for our bad news about the volcanic winter to reach them, for that process to start.”

“Or even,” Kalinski said, “for confirmation that the Hatch is actually two-way, that it’s safe to pass through. I know Michael King.”

“We must help them,” the ColU said.

“Yeah. But we’ll be in charge,” Yuri said firmly. Kalinski looked at him strangely, but he ignored her. “ColU, let’s go to the hull, and get some warm clothing, and work out where to start.”

“One thing, Yuri Eden.”

“Yes?”

“I heard about the decisions made on Mercury. I’m sorry for your loss.” It held out a bundle of dried-out stems. Mister Sticks.

Yuri took the doll.

Then the ColU whirred, turned, and rolled away along a track that was now well worn, trampled down by eight years of use. Yuri followed briskly, carefully carrying the beat-up little doll.