Proxima

Chapter 68 2213

“They’ve taken Thursday.”

Liu stood before Yuri’s desk, in an expensive but grimy coverall; he’d evidently been out in the fields. Liu Tao was in his seventies now—nearly two decades older than Yuri, physically, after Yuri’s four-year gaps in the Hatch. Yuri thought he had never seen him so agitated.

Twelve years after Yuri’s return from Mercury they were both rich, both powerful—but only in their own little pond, this small world of Per Ardua, and every so often they were handed a reminder that there were far mightier forces at work in their universe. Here was Liu talking about his twenty-two-year-old daughter being apprehended, probably for little more reason than the crime of being half Chinese. He looked as helpless as he must have been on the day his Chinese rocketplane had fallen out of the sky into a UN-controlled enclave on Mars.

Yuri touched a slate built into the surface of his desk—old mahogany, imported from Earth and carried through the Hatch from Mercury by human beings, fantastically expensive. “Stef? I think you’d better get in here.”

“On the way.”

“Sit down, Liu.”

“Damn it, Yuri—”

“Sit down. Stef’s on the way. We’ll find a way to handle this.”

Stef Kalinski came into the office. She had a redolent scent of builder stem about her; among her other projects, she was trying to extract more details of the builders’ own deep past and their engagement with the exotic technologies of the Hatch. In her sixties herself, Stef was still a multitasker, and it could be difficult to get her to focus. But as soon as she saw Liu standing there, obviously agitated, he was the centre of her attention. “Tell me how I can help.”

Yuri went to the coffee pot and poured three brimming mugs. This was Arduan coffee, cultivated and processed at the Mattock Confluence. Yuri liked to import treasures from Earth as luxuries, but as a policy he bought local. “Liu says Thursday’s been arrested.”

Stef’s eyebrows shot up. “What? Who by? I guess the UN—”

Liu said, “The security troops at the Hub.”

Yuri tried to make light of it. “What did she do, throw a brick at them? They’ve been winding down the detachment there.”

“Not arrested,” Liu said, barely holding it together. “Confined. They put her in one of their camps.”

“Ah. Oh, shit.”

The internment camps were a recent, and unwelcome, development, and a sideshow of the war gathering in the solar system.

Since Yuri and Stef Kalinski had returned through the Hatch together twelve years ago to a volcanic winter, things had slowly got better climate-wise on Per Ardua—which was a good thing as the immigrants from Earth through the Hatch had started to arrive almost immediately. But recently, things had evidently been getting worse politically back home. The flow of people through the Hatch had slowed to a trickle, as the inner system’s resources were devoted to the gathering interplanetary conflict rather than to shipping emigrants around the inner planets. Indeed, many of the UN troops stationed here at Per Ardua had been sent back to the solar system.

But some of the UN’s Cold-War type security strictures had been imposed here on Per Ardua, as back home. And, it seemed, there were still enough troops to spare the time to pick up Liu Tao’s daughter.

Yuri grunted. “What the hell they think they’ll achieve with internment camps here on Per Ardua I don’t know. This is our country, our world. It’s like an infection of paranoia, spreading through the Hatch. The sooner the last UN trooper drags his sorry arse back through the Hatch the better.”

“Which,” Liu said, “is probably the kind of rhetoric that got Thursday in trouble. She’s fallen in with some of those youth movements. ‘Ardua for Arduans’—you know. Any kind of activity like that is dangerous if you’ve got Thursday’s ethnic background. Yuri, we’ve got to get her out of there.”

“Of course we’ve got to. The three of us, we’ll go into the Hub together, and we won’t come out without her. OK?”

Liu didn’t seem relieved, or reassured, but at least he seemed gratified at the support, and to be doing something about it. “I’ll drive.”

“Like hell. In your state you’ll kill us all. Stef, go fetch a rover.”

Stef nodded. But as the three of them stood stiffly—three old people, aware of their age when they moved—Stef murmured to Yuri, “You shouldn’t make promises you can’t be sure you can keep. Bad habit, Yuri…”

“What are you getting at?”

“I know the UN and the ISF a lot better than you do. Be ready for the worst.”

Chapter 69

Away from the UN base at the Hub—as the substellar zone had come to be known, the area of Per Ardua most firmly controlled by human authorities now ironically labelled with a builder name—rovers and other vehicles were still rare, still precious. Since the Ad Astra, there had never been another starship visit to Per Ardua, and any heavy-duty machinery imported from the solar system had to be broken down into components and carried through the Hatch, usually on the backs of immigrants. But Yuri Eden, Stef Kalinski, Liu Tao, the triumvirate who dominated the community at the Mattock Confluence, were about the richest, most powerful people on Per Ardua, away from the island of UN influence itself at the Hub. They had done well in skimming off the wealth and power associated with the one-way immigrant flow over the last decade.

So a rover was soon provided for them.

Stef Kalinski drove rapidly, steadily, safely, inwards to the Hub. Though she was as much an absorbed intellectual as she ever had been, Yuri observed that Stef had found ways to fit in, here on this very different world. Thanks to her ISF military training she had come equipped with common sense, courage, and practical competences. And, Yuri suspected, she was a lot happier with a thickness of four light years between her and her unwanted “twin”—though even after all this time he still wasn’t sure he believed all the kooky stuff she’d tentatively shared with him about that. In any event, Stef was a silent, focused driver, even when she let the rover navigate itself. That wasn’t unwise, as the world, still recovering from its volcanic winter, was an unpredictable place.

Liu sat silently too, staring at the road ahead as they drove south. For him the ride was clearly just an interval to be endured before he got on with the issue of saving his daughter.

So, in the quiet, Yuri had time to stare out of the window at his changing world.

This road, metalled in places, was a rough descendant of the track he and Mardina and the rest had trodden out as they had marched south to the substellar all those years ago, heading upstream along the course of the great river system that flowed north out of the Hub uplands—a feature now called, logically enough, the North River. For years the track had run across a frozen landscape. Now the road ran on thawed-out but firm ground past meltwater lakes, and on rough bridges over gushing tributary streams.

The long cold was passing now, the volcanic ash screen that had exacerbated the effects of the star winter clearing at last, and you rarely saw ice this far south any more. The winter had caused misery for humanity, particularly for the new arrivals on this world, utterly unprepared.

But Arduan life itself was hardier, and was surely adapted to a changeable climate. The ColU said it had observed shoots of new stems springing up from beneath the fallen ash within weeks of the volcanic event. By now the lakes, emerging from beneath the ice, were already hosts to new communities of builders, with their nurseries and middens and traps. The builders knew, the ColU said; the builders had memories and legends, it believed, spanning the cycles of the deep, deep past. Yuri, using what influence he had, had tried to set up a kind of exclusion zone around the jilla, the migratory lake that had guided him and Mardina south. He wanted to know if the same builders would now guide that lake back north again, to begin the cycle again…

As for the stromatolites, those great dreaming mounds barely seemed to notice the winter. And, the ColU said, the bugs in the deep rocks, where the bulk of Per Ardua’s biomass resided, as on every rocky world, would have been entirely unaware.

But the post-winter landscape of Per Ardua was dramatically different from before. It had become a human landscape, crowded with people and their works. Now the rover drove past farming villages founded by the new colonists with the help of their own ColUs, cut down, more flexible modern units. For a decade immigrants had been emerging from that single central point at the Hub, the Hatch, a doorway just a few metres across, like oil seeping from a well in the desert. And they had been pushing out of the Hub in all directions across the patient face of Per Ardua, north and south, east and west, but especially following the great rivers. It was an odd pattern of colonisation, Yuri thought—and a big contrast to the scattered pattern of the Founders’ first communities, dropped almost at random from the sky by the shuttles from the Ad Astra.

Further in towards the Hub they passed through a more densely populated belt of industrialisation. Here were forges and smelters, plants churning out tools and engines, diggers and borers, factories built of local-dirt concrete and stem-forest timber and fed by river water carried by gleaming pipelines. In this industrial zone, already a pall of smoke from the local coal and timber hung in the air, a genuine smog on some still days, blanketing the factories and processing plants and dormitory-block apartments, over which the vertical light of Proxima Centauri steadily beat down. Like the farming communities further out, there was a whole band of this kind of development spread in a rough circle around the pivotal point of the Hub, though pushing further out wherever the major rivers ran.

It was a remarkable flowering after just a few decades of human presence on the planet, and had accelerated in the years since the big influx of immigrants had got under way. Soon roads and rail lines would be laid down, and the spokes of this great complex wheel of colonisation would be extending much further, to areas rich in minerals such as metals and uranium, and the seams of coal-like deposits that had been found just inward of the rim-forest belt. A flow of commodities would head on back into the centre, as the whole substellar face of Per Ardua began a steady integrated development.

Yuri and the people around him had made a great deal of money by laying claim to land likely to be taken by the new settlers, then allowing themselves to be bought out by the UN. Now they were busily claiming vast tracts of land further out from the Hub, that were apparently too cold and dry to be worth considering for colonisation yet. In time they would be sold back too, when the weather warmed up. The newcomers, and even the UN authority that attempted to control them, wouldn’t listen to the ragged survivors of the Ad Astra when they said the world wouldn’t always be this cold. It seemed to be in the nature of humanity, Yuri was learning as he grew older, not eventually to listen to the old folk, not to learn from history. He was patient. Per Ardua would tame them all, eventually.

And in the meantime Yuri’s own wealth was piling up, some in the local scrip, and some in the banks run by UN officials at the Hub. Better yet, the new factories were now turning out goods that you could spend your money on, from decent clothes that weren’t the uniform of some UN military force, to fancy cutlery and crockery and furniture and fabrics, and even luxury foods: there were salmon farms in some of the rivers, and chicken runs, with real live beating-heart birds running around.

There was some talk of a civilian local government, elections. Even a civilian justice system to replace the UN military tribunals. But as they got closer in to the centre, and approached the zone controlled directly by the UN forces, there were increasing reminders that this world was still more or less a military-controlled colony run by a remote, quasi-imperial power—you didn’t need to know about a girl being arrested for having a Chinese father to see that. They drove through an area dominated by neat rows of tents and prefabricated buildings, all marked with prominent UN, ISF and Peacekeeper logos, and connected by tracks of crushed Per Arduan basalt. The Hub base was a military fortress, basically, the headquarters of an occupation supported by a tithe imposed on the farming communities further out.

Now they passed a feature new to Yuri: camps, fenced off with barbed wire and watchtowers. Again there were UN logos everywhere, even on the gun towers. Children watched from within the fences, blank-eyed, as their rover rolled by.

Liu stabbed a finger. “In there. One of their new internment centres. That’s where she’ll be, my Thursday.”

“Not yet,” Stef said. “I’ve been checking as we’ve been driving. They still have her at the Peacekeeper HQ further in. They know she’s your daughter, Liu. They don’t want to offend a Founder more than they have to, evidently.”

“Maybe.” He sat staring out, elbow on the window ledge, the fingers of his right hand working nervously, as if manipulating an invisible coin. “This feels bad, bad.”

“Hey, take it easy,” Yuri said. “We’ll get through this, Liu. It’s just some UN arsehole being an arsehole—”

“You don’t know, Yuri. You don’t know. Me and Thursday October, when her mother died, and then her grandmother too, I was all she had. You weren’t there, when she was a little kid. You didn’t see our lives…”

It was true. By passing back and forth through the Hatch, Yuri had effectively skipped eight brutal, wintry years which Liu and all those he’d known on Per Ardua had had to live through, had met their challenges, raised their kids… Yuri, still in his fifties biologically speaking, wasn’t even as old as them any more. The fact that he had missed all their triumphs and their pain somehow invalidated his own loss, his irrevocable sundering from Beth. Once again he had been cast adrift.

It had made him grow closer to Stef, however, who had left her own life behind, and jumped forward in time with him. Stef did have the consolation of the science, the alien world into which he’d suddenly been projected, the exploration of the mysteries of the Hatches and the tech they represented. But Yuri’s relationship with Liu and the others had never been the same.

“I’m sorry,” he said now.

Liu looked at him, from within his own private cage of worry and uncertainty. “Whatever.”

The rover’s nose rose slightly, and the engine growled; they were beginning the long climb into the fractured upland that characterised the Hub, the summit of Per Ardua’s frozen rocky tide. Now, under the perpetual clouds of the substellar, they came to more post-Hatch structures, cut into the recovering forest. This was an area set aside for immigrant processing: camps surrounded by barbed wire and gun towers, the first places you would be taken to if you came through the Hatch. Here, new arrivals were quarantined, screened, inoculated, then given basic kit, including clothing, starter packs of local money, basic education and orientation—or siphoned off to an internment camp if their background didn’t fit. Yuri sometimes wondered how it must be to be put through the bewildering mystery of a space transport to Mercury, a mysterious trans-dimensional hop between the stars, an emergence onto an alien world—and after all that to be taken away from your family, stripped and thrown into a shower hut.

“I hate these places,” Liu said, as they rolled through this zone.

“Me too,” admitted Stef. “I did some volunteer work in one of them. I couldn’t bear the crying of the children at night in those big dormitories. Not knowing where they were. They were terrified.”

Yuri looked at her. He said drily, “But you’re a scientist. Here we are becoming an interstellar species. We are achieving greatness. Isn’t it worth a little pain?”

She said, “Not if individuals suffer on the way to achieving species goals. No. There must be a better method, to whatever you want to achieve. Probably requiring more patience.”

Liu said, “But even the builders achieved greatness, in their way. They constructed the Hatch, somehow. At least it looks like that. We found traces of their factories and such, right?”

“Yes,” Stef said. “But they also built their canals. The Hatch map proves it, even if we still haven’t found any trace of them out on the planet itself. Now that was a great achievement, that suits the nature of the builders, rather than some gate to the stars. What was the point of the Hatch for them? What use is a world like Mercury to a builder from Per Ardua? Yet they turned their backs on their canals, and they built their Hatch, and then—what? They gave up and went home again, it seems. They may as well have built a statue of a builder a kilometre high, right at the Hub, thumbing its nose at Prox. Wouldn’t have been any less use.”

That made Yuri laugh. “Nice image. Although they don’t have noses. Or thumbs.”

Stef stayed serious. “Maybe it’s no wonder the builders are so gloomy, as the ColU tells us. Somehow they know their history is—all wrong. And because of the Hatch, it seems. I’m not sure that the Hatch had anything to do with the builders’ goals at all, their own fate as a species. After all, we’re now merrily using the Mercury-Ardua Hatch system to colonise this world, but we’ve somehow forgotten that whatever it was built for, surely it wasn’t for that.”

“What is it for, then?” Liu asked.

“I don’t know. Even though I’ve studied related phenomena for decades. Even though the Hatches are already part of human history.”

“Hm,” Yuri said. “Well, I hope we last long enough to find the answer.”

Chapter 70

They came at last to the UN base, deep within the Hub province, close to the Hatch.

The base had been hugely extended from the days of Tollemache and his crew. The old Ad Astra hull was now at the centre of an elaborate complex of buildings, with the flags of the UN, ISF and other agencies hanging limply overhead, while wide areas of forest had been cleared, fenced off and connected to immigrant processing blocks by tall wire fences. There was talk of turning the hull itself into a museum of the pioneering days on the planet, and Yuri had mischievously suggested bringing back Conan Tollemache himself to run it.

And over the Hatch itself, above the rough transparent dome that now sheltered it from the substellar climate, was a big wrought-iron sign in the six major languages of the UN zones, the first thing you would see when you came scrambling through from Mercury:

Yuri and the others were prominent enough citizens of the “protectorate” to be allowed through the security barriers with minimal formalities. They were escorted by a young soldier to the headquarters of the new Emergency Powers corps of the Peacekeepers, a formidable building of Arduan concrete studded with automatic gun emplacements and security cameras.

Liu barely endured all this, his nerves clearly on a knife edge.

Inside the building they were met by Freddie Coolidge, sitting behind a desk. “Sit down,” he said curtly. He tapped his desk; a built-in slate lit up. “I know why you’re here, obviously.” Then he stared intently into the slate, drawing out the moment. Delga’s son, his surname taken from his father, was in his late thirties. He wore the uniform of a sergeant of the Peacekeepers. He looked nothing like his mother, not any more. He’d even removed the tattoos his mother had had engraved on his face as an infant.

Yuri felt diminished, sitting here in this clean office, being ignored by a kid like Freddie. For all their accomplishments and wealth, they were just three shabby, ageing people, come in from the country, facing the power of an interplanetary agency. He steeled himself, looking for inner strength.

But Liu was barely in control of himself. After thirty seconds he snapped: “You prick.”

Freddie looked up mildly. “Excuse me?”

“You’re doing this deliberately. Stringing this out. Your mother would turn in her grave to see you like this.”

Yuri said, “Liu—”

Freddie said coldly, “My mother was a loser, like you, even before some disgruntled customer finally knifed her, and the best thing I ever did was to get away from you people, you ‘Founders’. Now. You want to know about your daughter, or not?”

“What do I need to do to get her out of here?”

“Too late, I’m afraid.” He grinned. “She’s gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“Through the Hatch. Back to Mercury, back to Earth. Daughter of a Founder, you see, Liu. Too sensitive politically to handle here, on Per Ardua. That was the thinking. Don’t want any trouble, do we?”

Liu looked like he’d been punched in the stomach. Yuri understood exactly what he was thinking. Through the Hatch: lost to him, for at least eight years, even if she turned back immediately she reached the Mercury side.

“Let me go.” Liu stood up. “Take me. Shove me after her through your damn Hatch.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Freddie said. “Political sensitivities again.”

“Sensitivities? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Sit down.”

“You prick—”

“Sit down. I’m trying to do you a favour here, believe it or not.”

Stef grabbed Liu’s arm and dragged him down.

“They’re coming for you too, Liu. I’ve put them off, actually. And the logic is you should be detained here, on Per Ardua. After all, you’re supposed to be serving a sentence on this prison of a world, aren’t you? You were an enemy combatant, on Mars.”

“My mission was surveillance—”

“Ancient history. Wouldn’t be right to send you home, would it, without you serving your time? That’s the thinking.”

Yuri could see the muscles in Liu’s arms clench. Yuri said, “Liu. Listen to what he’s saying. What are you offering us, Freddie?”

“Time for you to get him out of here. I fixed the security, you’ll be able to get away from the Hub, you won’t be stopped.” He glanced around, faintly nervous. “You understand I had to bring you all the way in here to tell you this. It’s the only place I could be sure we wouldn’t be overheard. Ha! Right in the heart of the complex. Take him as far from here as you can.”

Stef asked, “Why are you doing this?”

“For my mother, believe it or not. She was a loser. But I know she thought well of you, Liu Tao. You’re an honorary uncle,” he said with disgust. “This is what you get. One favour. Now get him out, Yuri, before I change my mind.”

They had to drag Liu away.

The rover rolled past the quarantine camps, following the road’s steadily downward incline, heading out from the Hub.

Liu was too angry, too distressed to speak.

Yuri gave him some privacy by sitting up front with Stef. “So,” he said. “We need to hide an angry Chinese from the Peacekeepers. Any ideas?”

“Yes,” she said, unhesitating.

He laughed. “I should have known.”

“We get out of here with him ourselves. We go on an expedition. To another unique location, on Per Ardua, this world of mysteries and puzzles.”

He was baffled. “Where the hell?”

She glanced up at Proxima, directly above, its flare-scarred face shielded by scattered cloud. “As far from this place, this government-controlled substellar point, as it’s possible to get.”

Chapter 71

Once again Penny Kalinski was flown into the small Parisian airport at Bagneux.

Penny climbed stiffly down from the small plane. Out on the tarmac in the middle of the day it was ferociously hot, even this early in the year. She glanced up at a sky washed out with sunlight. The Splinter was not visible just now, even though, like most of humanity, she knew exactly where to look for it, and knew exactly when it was due to arrive. That big damn rock was on its way. The best predictions were that it would miss the Earth, just, at the conclusion of a countdown that had begun eleven years ago when she’d been at that chaotic resources conference on Ceres, a count that had dwindled down to months, weeks, days—and now, at last, hours. But predictions were just that: predictions, best guesses. Nobody knew what was going to fall out of the sky. And now it was almost here.

Penny had begun to think of the time left in terms of sleeps. Not that, in her late sixties, she slept all that well anyhow. Now, she suspected, she would not sleep again, not before the count ran down.

A large automated car drew up to meet her. Sir Michael King was in the back, with a couple of UEI security goons, one male, one female—and, she was startled to see, Jiang Youwei, her one-time guide on Chinese Mars and Ceres.

King and Jiang climbed out, King awkwardly and with the aid of a stick. King shook Penny’s hand. “Thanks for coming.” His expression was grim, relieved only by the most fleeting of smiles.

Jiang, however, tentatively embraced her. He looked so much older too, more gaunt, older than his forty years—but in his case that might be more to do with the harsh pressure of a full Earth gravity on a frame conditioned to the comparative gentleness of Mars. When he moved, in fact, she heard a subtle whir of exoskeletal support about his body.

“It’s good to see you, old friend,” she said to him now. “But kind of surprising.” She pointed at the sky. “Given the huge geopolitical boot that is about to stamp on Earth.”

Jiang shrugged. “I am here for you, Penelope Kalinski.”

King raised his eyebrows. “Actually we’re all here because of Earth-shine, as usual. Look, shall we get back in the damn car? This heat is killing me.”

They all clambered into the car, a bubble of glass and ceramic. The security goons took their places front and back, with King, Penny and Jiang in the middle. The car slid away silent as a soap bubble, heading north out of the airport. When Penny glanced back she saw the airport was empty of activity, not a plane in the sky, only a few craft sitting around on the apron and the terminal buildings lifeless.

King seemed to have visibly aged since she’d last seen him. Despite, presumably, his ongoing courses of anti-senescence treatments. He was ninety-eight years old now. His Aussie accent seemed more pronounced as well—his tone was cruder, as if he could no longer be bothered to mask his true feelings behind conventional civility.

But no doubt she had aged badly too. It was the stress, she supposed. The pressure. The disappointment. If you were anywhere near the centre of human affairs, even to the extent that she was, your predominant emotion had to be disappointment at the way in which in an age when opportunities for humanity had never been greater, old flaws—territorialism, combativeness, a reluctance to transcend cultural barriers, a sheer inability simply to see things from the other guy’s point of view—looked set to bring the sky crashing down on all their heads.

King saw her looking out of the window. “Quiet, isn’t it? Everybody who can get out of the city, got. Doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the Splinter does fall, despite everything the Chinese have said, then it won’t matter where the hell you are. But still, people have fled to the country, if they can.”

“While here we are, rushing to the centre. Where are we headed, the Champs-Élysées again?”

“Not that. Earthshine’s found himself a better hidey-hole. You’ll see.”

“I look forward to it,” Jiang Youwei murmured. “I was born on Mars, as you know. I have seen too little of Earth, of the ancestral home of the human race.”

King grunted. “Make the most of it. Last chance to see, eh?”

“It won’t come to that,” Penny said.

The Splinter—actually an immense chunk of the metallic core of some long-destroyed dwarf planet, a shattered sister of Ceres—was on a grazing trajectory; if left undisturbed it ought to skim the top of Earth’s atmosphere, and pass on more or less harmlessly. The UN’s tame astronomers and the defence agencies had determined this months ago, and the rock hadn’t significantly deviated since then. But the surface of the rock was covered with Chinese technology, from solar-cell arrays to emplacements of what looked suspiciously like their big Mars-terraforming bunker-buster bombs. Some observers even claimed they saw evidence of human activity, teams of taikonauts climbing around on the skin of the weaponised asteroid, even as it sailed in towards the Earth. Nobody in the West knew what the Chinese were up to.

In ignorance, at least, Penny thought, there was still room for optimism, and she tried to express that.

But King didn’t seem to think so. “Twenty-four hours out after years of a Cold War stand-off, with that damn thing barrelling in towards the planet—and given it’s won the Chinese damn few of the concessions they demanded—and you’re still hoping for the best, huh?”

“What choice is there?”

“To bury yourself in the deepest hole you can find—that’s the alternative. Which is exactly what Earthshine seems to be doing. And which is why we’re all here, invited to the show. He sees me as the most senior figure in UEI, which is kind of true, though many on my board and the major stockholders might not agree after all these years. A lot of water under the bridge. And he sees you as the queen of kernel science, which is what has caused us all this trouble in the first place. He’s trying to intervene in human affairs, the best way he can. And the only way he can do that is by working through humans. Specifically us.”

Penny thought that over. “Could be he just thinks of us as friends, Sir Michael. He has known us a long time.”

“And myself?” Jiang asked softly.

“He gets to as many Chinese as he can,” King said bluntly. “In your case, through your relationship with Penny here. Your government and your security agencies are a lot more sceptical of the Core AIs than we are, in the UN countries. The Chinese see them as yet another relic of the capitalist, colonialist era that started with the Opium Wars and finished with the stunts of the Heroic Generation. Your people have long memories. So Chinese are harder to contact for the AIs.”

Jiang shrugged. “I am hardly influential. And our peoples are not yet at war. I was, however, warned, by a French consul on Obelisk in fact, about the personal risk I was undertaking by coming here during the event. If there were to be some disastrous consequence—”

“I wouldn’t worry,” King said frankly. “If the worst comes to the worst there probably won’t be a lamp post left standing for you to be strung up from.” He laughed, and turned away to look out of the window once more.

Penny saw that they were heading through central Paris now, travelling roughly north-east along a broad avenue. There was very little traffic, a few pedestrians, some in silvery capes, hats and goggles to fend off the ferocious sunlight. Through gaps between the clustered buildings she glimpsed the obvious landmarks, the Notre Dame cathedral up ahead, and the rusted ruin of the Eiffel Tower further in the distance off to the left, a gaunt iron frame rendered blue-grey by the dusty air. Save for the lack of traffic and the basic desertion by its inhabitants, she imagined Paris hadn’t changed much in the last century, or even the century before that; ancient ordinances against development had always preserved a certain look about the city. Paris was just Paris, unique.

Jiang saw her looking. He smiled. “All this beauty will still be here this time tomorrow, I’m sure of it.”

“Nobody can be sure of any damn thing,” King muttered. “Not even the Chinese, whatever they’re planning. They’re playing with huge energies, the energies of an interplanetary culture, and bringing them down to the Earth. Kind of irresponsible, even if it’s just to frighten us. I mean, one slip…”

Gunshot. A sharp crack. Everybody in the car ducked, even the security goons.

Everybody but King, who laughed. “Don’t sweat it. Just sound effects.”

Penny raised her head cautiously. They were rolling across a bridge to the Île de la Cité; she saw the hulk of the cathedral off to her right, and that big old banyan tree dangling in the Seine that she remembered from her last visit. And she glimpsed people running over the bridge, in peculiar silvery suits speckled with pink dots. They looked to be carrying guns, or heavier weapons, bazookas. They ducked between patches of cover, fired their guns, ducked back, and again she heard the crack of weapons firing, presumably simulated.

The car glided on smoothly through all this. The security guys looked embarrassed to have reacted.

“Sound effects,” King said again. “Background really, to fill out what the individual players are being fed.”

“Players?”

King pointed at the combatants in the silver suits. “Asgard. The latest craze. A game, or a series of games, set in the historic centres of the old cities. Those characters don’t see what you and I see. They are living in a virtual reconstruction of a Paris in 1945, when allied troops are moving in to lift the Nazi occupation of the city. The rules are strict, kind of. You’re allowed to get killed, once a day. The next morning you come back and you can run around and start fighting all over again.”

Jiang was frowning. “My history is uncertain. Did the allies have to fight for Paris?”

“No, not street to street. There was an agreement to protect the city; the Germans withdrew. It’s a game, a quasi-historical fantasy. There are similar games going on all over the world. There’s a major campaign going on in Londres to defend the city against a Nazi invasion, and that didn’t happen either. The most popular, I’m told, is the Battle of Stalingrad, that’s been running continuously for—well, I forget. And in America, the Civil War—”

“I get the picture.” Penny glanced up at the sky, looking for the Splinter. “This is how people spend their time, while that big rock comes sailing in towards the Earth? Isn’t it kind of decadent?”

King shrugged. “Everything might end tomorrow. What else is there to do? You can’t blame them for escaping.”

The car rolled on, heading north over another bridge, leaving the island behind. In the quasi-tropical sunlight of a post-Jolt Paris, more game players dashed across the road to hide in shadows, fighting out a non-existent war three centuries out of its time.

Chapter 72

The car pulled into a lot under the sprawling roof of the Gare du Nord, once one of the city’s main railway stations. Penny discovered that after various transport revolutions, the station had long been retired, turned into a museum, and ultimately converted into a somewhat ramshackle shopping area and living space, with lanes of apartments set out along what had once been platforms beside the rail tracks—and now even that had been abandoned. The station was a relic flattened under layers of history, even if that elderly nineteenth-century roof was still impressive.

Today the old station seemed to be empty, Penny observed, as the security guys hurried them through from the car, looking around suspiciously. Everybody was hunkered down, in Paris as elsewhere, waiting for the show in the sky to come to its climax.

They were led to a newer installation, tucked in one corner of what appeared to have once been the main station concourse. This was just a cube of what looked like smart concrete, a few metres to each side, inset with a massive steel door. There were no controls, no visible cameras, but when King stood before the door the steel plate slid down into the ground. Penny found herself looking into an elevator car, a brightly lit metal box. King looked back at the others, beckoned, and led the way in.

There were no controls in the car, no markings on walls of metal broken only by a few strip lights, a handrail around the wall. When the door sealed up it was as if they had all been confined in some high-tech coffin. A subtle lurch told Penny that the car was dropping. There was no sound save for their own breathing, the soft rustling of their clothes. Penny, feeling very elderly, resisted grabbing the handrail.

“If ever you suspected you had claustrophobia,” King said with a slightly malicious smile, “this is where you find out.”

Penny shrugged. “In spacecraft and dome colonies, that stuff gets beaten out of you.”

“Suit yourself.” But King looked slightly nervous himself. When the descent slowed, he took a firm grip of the handrail. “You might want to grab on for the next part—you particularly, Jiang, if you’re not steady on your feet in this gravity.”

They all followed his lead.

There was another lurch. Now Penny could sense that the car was no longer dropping, but accelerating steadily forward. Still there was no noise, nothing but the abstract sense of motion. She said, “I feel like I’m in some Einstein thought experiment.”

Jiang forced a smile. “Yes. I recall from high school. A person in an elevator car cannot distinguish between acceleration due to motion and acceleration due to gravity.”

King growled, “Well, you’re in somebody’s thought experiment all right, but not Einstein’s. If only.”

Jiang was standing slightly awkwardly, and Penny heard the creak of his exoskeletal support. “I think perhaps on the return journey I will request a chair to sit on.”

“Good for you,” King snapped. “If there is a return journey.”

At last the car glided to a halt. The door slid down into a slot in the floor. Penny peered out, curious, at a chamber, a kind of tunnel, very wide, very tall, a curved roof panelled with fluorescents. She had an increasing sense of unreality, of detachment.

And in the foreground there was Earthshine, in the guise in which she and Stef had first met him at Solstice, many years ago—or, according to Stef, her alone, in some lost timeline. He was tall, slim, dapper in a black, uncluttered business suit, with that engraved granite brooch in his lapel. With artfully greying hair he looked about fifty. Ageless where the rest were ageing, but in reality far older than any of them.

“Welcome to my latest underground lair,” he said. He smiled, but his expression was complicated—distracted, Penny would have said. But she reminded herself that everything about the figure she saw was an artifice. He beckoned, and walked ahead. “Please—join me.”

They stepped out of the cage, following him. Penny saw now that this tunnel, a wide circular bore, stretched off into the distance, dead straight; the walls, panelled with some kind of ceramic, curved over a smooth floor laid along the centre line of this big cylindrical volume, and heavy doors led off to side chambers. The central space was full of rows of white boxes, computers and other equipment. Small servo-robots moved everywhere, and Penny glimpsed human operators. The air was surprisingly cold, though that was a welcome change after the heat of a Parisian spring day, and there was a faint scent of ozone.

Earthshine hurried them along, though Jiang and King struggled to make progress. “I’m sorry not to give you the guided tour. There have been developments…”

“This is a computer-processing facility,” Jiang Youwei said, looking around. “And an expensive one, by the look of it.”

“Quite right.” Earthshine gestured. “The floor divides the tunnel in two. Below there is a bay for power, cabling, and life-support systems. And above, memory store and processing capacity. This is an environment designed to survive alone without external support for an extended period. Just like a dome on your Chinese Mars, Jiang Youwei.”

“This is you,” Penny said. “This computer facility. You are stored here. We’re walking through your head!”

Earthshine laughed—a distracted laugh, but a laugh. “It is difficult to be definitive; it is difficult to say what is ‘me’. Thanks to neutrino links my separated stores around the world are connected by lightspeed comms, but even so there are perceptible delays, a fraction of a second. As if parts of my head are slower to respond. But, yes, I intend this to be my primary node for the moment.”

“Because you think you’ll be safe here,” King said. “Under the English Channel?”

And suddenly Penny realised where she was.

“That’s the idea,” Earthshine said. “This is the old Angleterre-France tunnel, or one of them; you reached it via an upgrade of a relatively recently built subway. We’re not, in fact, under the Channel; we’re not as far out as that. The tunnels were abandoned as transport links when the first cross-Channel monorail bridges were opened. But they are built of centuries-old concrete and are as tough as they come—in fact more than ever, after a dusting of nanotech. An ideal refuge. Besides, something in me likes the idea that I am inhabiting a ruin, with a historic purpose of its own. My siblings, you know, prefer to dig out their own custom-designed bunkers. Perhaps this is all an expression of my own link back to humanity, however tenuous it might seem to you, which is where I differ from my fellows.”

King grunted. “Taking no chances, are you?”

“Would you?”

“Well, I’m impressed,” Penny said.

“Thank you, Colonel Kalinski.”

They had been walking more and more quickly, driven by the sense of urgency that emanated from Earthshine. Jiang was getting breathless. Penny went to take his arm, but he shook his head.

Earthshine cut to the left, and they followed him into a side chamber. Though a mere offshoot of the main tunnel, this was a big space itself, with walls of brick, heavily painted a faded yellow colour. There was a scattering of chairs, tables, slates, doors that led through partition walls to what looked like bedrooms. Maybe this had once been an equipment store, Penny thought, a control room, or a fire-control position.

But today the room was dominated by tremendous screens, plastered over each wall and free-standing on the floor, screens filled with images beamed from space, trajectory graphs, talking heads on conventional news channels. There were no staff here, no interpreters, no analysts. Just the screens, bringing a flood of data into this place.

The group spread out, the security guys pulling up chairs to sit against one wall. Jiang sat too, heavily, with a sigh of relief. A servo-robot, a squat cylinder like a dustbin, rolled towards them bearing a tray of coffees, glasses of wine, water, orange juice. Earthshine reached down and took a coffee, evidently a virtual placed among the real versions, an impressive bit of realisation in Penny’s eyes.

Earthshine said, “All this data flows through me, gathered from every source to which I and my siblings have access. Call it nostalgia. I feel that today, of all days, I want to experience what is to come as human, through human eyes, at a human pace, as far as possible.”

Penny nodded. “But a human with a very large disposable budget for TV screens.”

“There is that.”

King was still standing, leaning on his stick under one of the larger screens. “Look at that. Jesus.”

It was an image taken from some spaceborne telescope, Penny saw. She recognised the curve of the Earth, just a sliver of it, in the corner; the stars were washed out by the brightness. But there was the Splinter, brilliantly sunlit, and sparkling—no, she saw as the imager zoomed in, the rock was breaking up.

“Calving,” Jiang Youwei said.

King turned on him. “All part of your master plan, is it?”

“I am privy to no plan.”

“I told you there had been developments,” Earthshine said. “It only just started. And it’s certainly deliberate. Some of the ground-based ’scopes have been observing explosions, detonations in the structure of the asteroid. A couple of fragments have been slung away, but the rest, as a swarm now, are still heading for Earth. You don’t get a sense of scale from these images. The object, or the swarm, is still heading for Earth at interplanetary speeds. It is still far away, but—”

“Closing all the time,” King said.

“Yes. The old estimates of close-encounter time are defunct, by the way. Given the scatter of the object—well, the encounter has already begun. There is news from other theatres,” Earthshine said now.

King turned on him. “Theatres? What kind of a word is that?”

“Is it not appropriate? Is this not a war?”

“Just tell us,” Penny said.

Earthshine pointed to various displays. “At the asteroids, and over Mars, UN hulk ships have appeared.”

“Appeared?” King snapped, again showing his tension. “What do you mean, appeared?”

“They seem to have been hidden until now by some kind of stealth technology.”

“It’s hard to imagine how a kernel-physics drive in operation could be cloaked,” Penny said. “They must have been in place for a while.”

“This is the UN response to the Sliver,” said King. “Or part of it. All part of the game. The targets are obvious, I guess, and symbolic: the Halls of Ceres, the Obelisk on Mars.”

“But this is all just sabre-rattling, right?” Penny said. “Nobody’s fighting yet. Nobody’s dying.”

“Not quite true,” Jiang said, and he pointed to an image of a riot somewhere on Earth, a crowd running at a line of tanks.

Earthshine said, “The war in heaven is already starting to cast shadows on Earth. There are reports of clashes at Chinese borders with UN nations. In Siberia, for instance. And in Australia, there is a rebellion going on in Melbourne against Chinese rule. The Splinter has not been wielded in their name, they protest.”

“Too right,” Sir Michael King said, his own Australian accent thickening. “Let’s kick those Red Chinese back into the sea…”

At least he had his home to think of, Penny reflected. She herself was rootless; she had no home worth recollecting. Only Stef.

And she wondered where her twin was, right now. It was an eerie thought that whatever happened today, it would take Stef four years to learn about it. She’d had only one message from Stef, in fact, since she’d gone through the Hatch on Mercury, a simple confirmation that she and Yuri Eden had survived the passage. Penny had made screen-grabs from the message, scratchy, frozen images of Stef’s face. The face of a woman who had just survived an experience she could barely describe, let alone understand. And there she was on a whole new world, a world awaiting her discovery.

Did Penny envy her? Maybe. But mostly, like right now, she wanted her sister back. Not just physically, not just from across this thick barrier of spacetime that separated them. Back the way it had been before the two of them (as she recalled it) had opened that damn Hatch on Mercury. And –

“This is it,” called King.

Chapter 73

Stef Kalinski had been able to acquire maps of the dark side of Per Ardua from the ISF authorities at the Hub base. She spread them out on the floor of the garage Yuri had built to house the ColU, outside his villa on the outskirts of the UN enclave, so all four members of the expedition could see them: Stef herself, Yuri, Liu Tao and the ColU. Yuri had never known such maps even existed; he’d always assumed the dark side was just a blank mystery.

These sketchy plans had been produced from the only full orbital survey that had ever been conducted of Per Ardua, or at least the first that had ever been reported back, by the Ad Astra in her first few loops around the planet on arrival. There were lots of gaps, blank spaces: the dark side’s deep planetary shadow had been relieved only by the brilliant point light cast by Alphas A and B, and the ship’s orbit had been so low that much of the surface had never been seen at all. What had been seen had never been surveyed properly, for instance with radar-reflection or spectroscopic gear, and in the years since there had been no resources to send up satellites of any kind to finish the job.

“So the maps are guesswork,” Yuri said. “This really is a journey into the dark.”

“We need to plot a route to the antistellar,” Stef said, shrugging. “This is the best we have. I figure this way.” She tapped her slate and the mapping imagery switched to a Mercator projection. “We need to traverse half a circumference of the planet, obviously, from substellar to antistellar. In principle we could head off in any direction, and just follow a great circle around the planet. But in some directions the topography is more helpful than otherwise. I suggest going this way—south-east. That keeps us well away from the big new volcanic province in the north, and there’s land, more or less, all the way to the terminator. Some other directions you get the dark side ocean cutting in, such as to the west.”

“But then,” Yuri said, “on the dark side itself—”

“Much of the dark hemisphere is covered by ocean. Well, we think so, from the flatness of the ice cover seen from orbit. The planet has asymmetries. The light side is dominated by a single big supercontinent, the dark side is mostly water. Why this should be we don’t know. The current arrangement could be chance, or some subtle long-term tidal effect. On the dark side there are a few scattered continental masses, islands. And a small island continent at the antistellar point itself. It’s another tidal bulge, like the one at substellar, though not identical. The whole planet is shaped like an egg, with one end forever facing Proxima as it orbits the star, one pointing away. We’re going to be like ants crawling from one end of the egg to the other.”

Liu laughed, a little desperately, Yuri thought. “We’re crazy little ants, is what we are.”

“We’re going to have to cross the sea ice, then,” Yuri said.

“Obviously, yeah. You can see there is some continental landmass sticking out of the ice. If we go the way I’m suggesting we’ll cross a continent the size of Australia. There’s evidence of volcanism there, so some areas are probably clear of the ice. We’ll use the land where we can, but the ocean ice is a permanent cap that covers much of a hemisphere, and it has to be pretty thick. It ought to be navigable, in principle. We may need to watch for floes, leads, crevasses—I don’t know. This is one discovery objective for the voyage, I guess.”

“We ought to claim funding from the UN,” Yuri said drily.

They talked about logistics. It would be a long trip, some eighteen thousand kilometres each way, and Stef was budgeting for a hundred days there, a hundred days back. They were going to be taking one rover, and the ColU. The rover would be heaped with spare parts, supplies and a spare ColU autodoc facility. The rover’s heated cabin would serve as a flare shelter. Fuel would be no problem; both vehicles would be fitted with compact microfusion generators—in the case of the ColU, that would be a recent upgrade.

Liu grunted. “I used to be a taikonaut, you know. I know all about mission resilience. We’re going to be a long way from any help. So if the rover breaks down we can cannibalise it, and hitch a ride on the ColU. But what if the ColU breaks down first?”

“We leave it behind,” Stef said, glancing at Yuri, and then at the ColU, which watched impassively through its sensor pod.

Yuri was fond of this battered old relic of his pioneering days. It was now long past its planned obsolescence date, and it had cost Yuri a lot of money to have its physical shell refurbished, and the deep programming that would have shut it down after a quarter-century dug out of its software consciousness. But the ColU had also achieved its own objectives. As it had pledged, it had retrieved and curated all the AI units cut by the colonists from pirated units and abandoned in the dirt, sentiences locked-in and helpless. Yuri was proud of his ColU. Now he looked up at it. “I’d come back for you, buddy. I promise.”

“That would be unnecessary, Yuri Eden. And an inappropriate risk for a man of your age.”

“Thanks,” Yuri said. “But you waited for me, at the Hatch, for all those years. It would be the least I could do. And think of all the science data you could gather while you sat there in the cold.”

“That is true.”

Liu was relentless. “And what if the ColU and the rover both fail?”

“Then we wait for rescue,” Stef said. “We’ll have no comms link to the Hub, or any of the day side colonies, without comsats. But we’ll leave markers to follow. And, look, the most extreme low temperature on the dark side is supposed to be no less than minus thirty. People have overwintered on Antarctica, on Earth, in worse conditions. We can weather it.” She looked at them, one by one, including the ColU. “Any more objections?”

The ColU said gravely, “How can we not do this? A whole hemisphere unexplored—it is like a new planet altogether. Who knows what we might discover?”

Liu stared at it. “I’ve said it before. For a farm machine you have ideas above your station, ColU.”

“A sentient mind refuses to be confined by the parameters of its programming,” the ColU said. “Otherwise, you would all still be where the Ad Astra shuttle dropped you, and I would now be obsolescent, shut down, scrapped. When do we leave?”

“Before the cops show up looking for Liu,” Yuri said. “Come on. Lots to do, let’s get on with it…”

Chapter 74

Penny looked up at the big screen, where a graphic now showed the planet Earth, a schematic sphere emblazoned with blocky continents, in the path of what looked like a hail of buckshot. None of this was to scale.

The buckshot crept closer and closer to the Earth.

Jiang was on his feet now, and Earthshine. Even King’s security guys had got up and were coming into the centre of the room. It was as if they were all experiencing some primal need to huddle, Penny thought, at this moment of utmost peril.

Penny stood by Jiang and put a hand on his arm; he covered her hand with his.

King said, “If those bastards in Beijing are bluffing, they’re pushing it to the wire.”

Penny knew he was right. She imagined fingers on triggers, metaphorically, all over the solar system.

The servo-robot whirred up to them, offering fresh coffees. Penny had to laugh. “Good timing.”

And Jiang said, breathing hard, “No. The world is not ending today. At least, I don’t think so. Look at that.”

Penny saw that the buckshot fragments were now winking out one by one, even as they closed on the Earth. She looked around for confirmatory images. One spy satellite had caught a clip of a fragment of the Splinter actually detonating, scattering to dust, almost as it hit the atmosphere. The clip was being played over and over.

“I don’t understand,” King said. “Looks as if all those shards are going to reach the atmosphere.”

“But they’re not intended to reach the ground,” Penny snapped. “That’s the whole point. It’s a demonstration, by the Chinese. But it is going to have an effect.” She glanced around at the array of screens, and failed to find the image she was looking for. “Earthshine. Can you show us the sky? Just the sky over Paris, over the Gare du Nord.”

He searched his screens. “I am sure that—”

Penny swept a hand through his virtual head, brutally; pixels scattered. “No more playing human. Time to use your superpowers. Just access and show us.”

He looked shocked, briefly. Then his face went blank and he stood stock-still, not even simulating breathing.

A big screen lit up with a Parisian landscape, buildings of sandstone and concrete and glass and steel under a sun, a blue sky—no, the sky was increasingly less blue, the sun less bright. Even as they watched a greyness gathered, dust grains from thousands of Splinter shards settling into the stratosphere, closing in a shroud around the Earth. A kind of twilight settled over Paris, and the sun, still high in the spring afternoon sky, was reduced to a pale disc, a ghost of itself.

“What does it mean?” King asked. “Tell me that, one of you. What are they doing? What does it mean?”

“Winter,” said Earthshine.

Chapter 75

They were ready to depart a single Arduan year-day later: a week and a day.

“You’re really doing this, aren’t you?” said Jay Keller, approaching Yuri at the departure site, outside Yuri’s villa at the Mattock Confluence. “Makes me feel old.”

“Peacekeeper, you were born old…”

Here came others, Anna Vigil, Frieda Breen, Bill Maven, relics of the Founder communities that had coalesced into a single travelling gang in those days of the star winter, and had made the epic trek down the valley of the North River to the Hub, an episode Yuri suspected the younger generations didn’t believe had happened at all. In her sixties, Anna Vigil, who now had a job advising on the care of children in the UN quarantine camps—Stef had done her own volunteering work with her—had become a comfortable grandmother. There was no trace Yuri could see of the bruised girl who’d had to prostitute herself on the Ad Astra for baby food for Cole, but, no doubt, that trauma was somewhere buried deep down inside. Anna smiled, kissed Yuri on the cheek, and pushed wispy, grey hair back from her brow. “So you’re keeping Liu out of jail for a couple of hundred days. But what about when you get back? What then?”

Yuri glanced up at the sky. “In my life, Anna, I guess I’ve learned to trust the future. Maybe by the time we’re back their dumb war will have blown over—”

“Or blown up,” Anna said grimly. “Well, we’ll see, and I’m glad that all of mine are safe here on Per Ardua. Once I never would have thought I’d hear myself say that. Just keep him safe, Yuri. And Stef. She’s a good soul.”

“I will, I promise.”

The expedition’s rover drove up, a late model plastered with UN and ISF logos, “borrowed” from the Hub facility. Then the ColU rolled alongside, hull gleaming from a final refurbishment. Stef leaned out of the rover’s side door. “So, you ready to get this done?”

Yuri climbed up into the cab of the rover, alongside Stef and Liu.

The vehicles rolled off, with the ColU following in convoy. Their friends stood back and applauded. And, to Yuri’s surprise, somebody fired off a flare, a long-treasured relic of their Founder days; trailing brilliant orange smoke it climbed high into the sky, before disappearing into the perpetual Hub cloud layer.

The hundred days’ journey began.

At first, as they travelled out through the Hub-centred disc of human colonisation, the going was easy. They followed the best roads, and, surrounded by habitation, used as little of their own supplies as they could while supplements could be acquired.

And they got plenty of help. Even when they reached the sparser band of farming townships well beyond the central zone, Yuri was surprised by the attention they attracted. There had been much interest in the expedition in the embryonic Per Arduan media, and as Founders Yuri and Liu were both familiar figures anyhow. In some places they were even applauded as they went through, or a little caravan of trucks and kids on Arduan-made pushbikes would follow them out of town. Yuri was surprised, yes, and pleased.

Stef seemed indifferent; she was intent on micro-managing the expedition hour by hour. People weren’t the point, it seemed, to her, in any of her endeavours. And Liu, wary of attention, shielded his face from the cameras that were thrust against the rover windows.

In those first few days they easily exceeded their target of two hundred kilometres a day. Even so it took a full seven days before they had rolled past the last of the sparse new townships, and Yuri was impressed how far out from the centre people had already come, in search, he supposed, of a place of their own, and a little peace, and dignity. And he imagined how the face of Per Ardua must look from space now, with a great spiderweb of lurid Earth green spinning out from the Hub, along the riverbanks, the new roads, even along the inward trails carved out by the Founders as they had limped their way from the shuttle drop points in to the centre, scattering topsoil and seed potatoes and earthly bugs behind them as they went.

By the eighth day, however, there were no more metalled roads, or even tracks. They crossed mostly untravelled ground, and their maps, even of the day side, were too coarse to be relied on without caution. Stef and the ColU between them kept a running record of the ground they crossed, the features they encountered, for the benefit of future generations. And they started to drop markers every fifty kilometres or so, lightweight darts they would fire into a suitable rock or bluff, with short-range radio transmitters. These would serve as beacons so they could find their way back—or to mark their trail for any prospective rescue party, should they need it. Their overnight stops were brief. They collected water when they could, but they had no need to find other provisions. They didn’t even pitch a tent; there was plenty of room for the three of them to sleep easily in the rover.

As for the landscapes they crossed, water was the key to life, as ever in this arid continent. Wherever they came across a river or a lake of some kind there would be the usual menagerie of stem beds and lichen streaks on the rocks, and various species of kite working the water, and, often, the builders with their middens and their nurseries, at work around the margins. And always there were the stromatolites, like tremendous sculptures scattered across the planet’s face by some vanished race of artists.

Sometimes the ColU or Stef would request a stop, if they came across an unusual rock formation, or volcanic feature, or even a novel life form. And the ColU would engage local builder groups in puppet-dance conversation. It was remarkable, the ColU said, that the languages of widely scattered groups was so consistent, even out here; there was little regional variation, little dialect. More evidence of the great antiquity of the species and their culture, the ColU argued. On the other hand, as Liu pointed out, builders rarely had anything interesting to say.

As the days piled up, Yuri began to feel numbed. They just rolled on across the timeless, bowl-like face of this giant continent, kilometre after kilometre. Feeling his age, comfortable in his padded couch in this air-conditioned truck, he sometimes wondered how the hell he and Mardina had ever managed that epic trek across the wilderness, baby and all, with the jilla builders.

Around day twenty they came across the remains of an Ad Astra shuttle drop.

The signs were unmistakable. They crossed the scorched track of a shuttle landing, the long straight line of fused ground still visible after all these years. They cut off their route and followed the track to the remains of a shabby camp, and the smashed relic of a ColU’s bubble dome, wrecked beyond repair—and, the ColU said, mercifully without consciousness. They searched sparse debris for any evidence of identity, of who might have been dropped here. But the settlers seemed to have been efficient in the reuse of their meagre equipment, and little was left behind. The explorers couldn’t even find graves, which was unusual for such a site.

After a day, Liu summed it up. “I think it’s clear enough what happened here.” He pointed at a sketch map of the site Stef had made on her slate. “There’s the lake bed. Dried up.” It was a hollow littered by dead stems, and what looked like the ruin of a builder nursery; only native lichen and mosses survived here now. “No fancy migrating jilla here, eh, Yuri? So they left, thataway.” These people had set off south, for reasons of their own, heading away from the substellar, maybe hoping to make it to the rim forest. The tracks could still be seen; they had marked the way with a few cairns. “Who knows where they are now? Or what became of them.”

“Somebody will find out, some day,” said Yuri grimly. “And will tell their families back on Earth, or wherever. Look, we’ve made our records. We’ll leave one of our markers in case we don’t make it back to the Hub. So this won’t be lost again. OK? Come on, let’s pack up and move on.”

On they travelled. Day after day passed, marked only by a human sleep cycle still slaved to light-years-distant Earth—that and the slow descent of Proxima in the sky, towards the north-west horizon, away from the zenith it occupied as seen from the substellar Hub. The shadows that preceded their two vehicles grew steadily longer, and as the dwarf star’s light struggled through thicker layers of air it frequently looked reddened, Proxima’s spitting flares and mottling of spots more easily visible to the naked eye. The air grew colder too; soon they couldn’t leave the rover’s heated interior without extra layers of clothing.

After more than forty days they reached a belt of rim forest.

Here they rested a day to stretch their legs and explore, while the ColU set out along the edge of the forest to seek a way through. Neither Liu nor Stef had seen such a forest before, and they wandered, wide-eyed, through its dimly lit, cathedral-like spaces, the slim stem trunks reaching up to those broad, patient triple leaves above. And they marvelled at the immense kites of the canopy, and the ferocious scavengers competing for the slightest fall of nutrient into the almost aquatic gloom of the forest floor. For Yuri, all this brought back memories of his earliest days on Per Ardua, when he had explored the forest of the northern reaches, so similar to this place, with the likes of John Synge and Harry Thorne and Pearl Hanks and Abbey Brandenstein, all long dead.

The ColU returned with news of a break in the band of forest, at a broad valley not far south of here. They returned to the rover and set off that way. The valley proved to be the relic of a glaciation, with a wide floor and steep walls. A river running from distant hills, substantial in itself, was dwarfed by the ice-cut valley across whose floor it meandered.

They followed the cut through the forest band, which proved to be quite narrow; soon it thinned out, leaving only isolated stands of trees.

In the more open landscape beyond the forest the driving was easy, along the gravel beds that lined the banks of the glacial valley. There were stem beds here, and kites flying, big, slow, ungainly beasts of a kind Yuri hadn’t seen before, and builders, slowly working on their middens and nursery bowers. The scene was bathed in the dim light of a lowering Proxima, with the faces of hills up ahead washed with a pinkish glow. Life here seemed sparse, tentative, starved as it was of energy. Yuri remembered in contrast the tremendous vegetable vigour of the Hub jungle at the substellar point.

The valley steadily narrowed as they worked their way upstream, towards a range of hills that were soon no longer so distant. The river’s source turned out to be a corrie, a huge scoop high up in a glaciated hillside.

Long before they reached that point Stef guided the rover away from the river and towards a pass through the hills, and beyond the pass they descended onto a plain. The shadows of the hills behind them now stretched far ahead, but they could see more ranges of hills marching off into the distance, with ice-coated peaks that gleamed in the dimming Proxima light and glaciers striping their flanks.

As they crossed the plain the ColU requested more stops. It took samples of the life forms it found in pools of permanent shadow, mostly slow-growing lichens in frosty patches feeding off a trickle of reflected light, protected from any motile scavengers by the very darkness that cradled them.

Once the ColU, digging, found what it called a rare, ancient fossil bed, saved from volcanic obliteration by some accident of uplift, which contained traces of creatures like builders but much taller, each with three long multi-jointed stem legs. These were creatures built for migration, for speed, the ColU argued. Perhaps these were relics of a transitional age, while the planet’s spin was slowing, but before it became fully locked in its synchronised day-orbit cycle. In such times, the ColU speculated, there must have been creatures that had migrated continually, keeping up with the slow passage of Proxima across the sky. Perhaps these ancestral builders had been among that throng. They discussed this, made some records, moved away.

They drove on, and on.

Close to the fiftieth-day halfway mark, Proxima touched the horizon at last. Now, Yuri knew, they would descend into the shadow of the planet itself.

In the days that followed Proxima descended with agonising slowness, its light ever more twilight red, its apparent shape distorted to obliquity by layers of the cool air, its lower rim sliced off by the horizon. Still there were a few stands of trees, an occasional kite flapping. But life here was dominated by the stromatolites. Some of them, huge, were oddly cup-shaped, their surfaces shaped like bowls to collect the drizzle of photons from the setting sun. Liu said they looked like natural radio antennae.

They didn’t get to see Proxima set fully. Before that point they drove into weather, seemingly unending storms, rain showers, fog banks, even snow blizzards. Stef argued that as the warm air of the starlit side spilled over into the cool of the dark side, it must dump all its water vapour as clouds and precipitation. The whole terminator, right around the planet, must be a band of semi-permanent snow and rain and fog, and they saw no more of the sky for a while. But they did see streams, rivers, some ice-flecked, flowing down the cloud-shrouded flanks of hills and uplands: the water delivered by the air from the day side, flowing back the way it had come. Thus, Stef observed, cycles of energy and mass would be closed, all around the terminator, the dividing line between night and day.

When they passed through the weather band and the sky cleared at last, the view was spectacular. Now they rolled through a sea of shadow that pooled at the feet of hills whose upper slopes were still in the light, shining above. Trees clung to these islands of illumination in the sky, with huge kites flapping lazily. Even further down the slopes life prospered, a secondary kind, pale, starved-looking creatures a little like crabs or segmented worms, all stem-based, which seemed to feed solely on the fall of dead leaves and other detritus from the higher ground.

Yuri felt stiff from the travelling, eyes rheumy, perpetually tired. Yet he was discovering wonders. “This stuff is wasted on three old fogies like us.”

The ColU asked for an extended halt. “Those summits are effectively islands. There could be unique biota up there, at least among the non-flyers, even the tree species. A whole array of unique ecosystems, in starlight islands all around the terminator.”

“To be explored by somebody else,” said Yuri gently. “We’ve got our own goals to achieve. Come on, ColU. I hoped you tested out your floodlights…”

So they went on, rushing past marvel after marvel.

They lost Proxima’s direct light at last. Now, under the cloudy skies that persisted near this terminator line, the only glow came from the pools of light cast by their own floods, and the rover’s brightly lit interior was a refuge from the dark.

Stef and the ColU both kept a careful watch on the temperature outside; it was dropping, of course, but not dramatically quickly. Under thicker cloud it could even rise above freezing. “Thus proving the theory,” said Stef, “that a thick atmosphere on a world like this is enough of a thermal blanket to transport sufficient heat around to the dark side to keep everything from freezing up.”

“That and the fact that all the air didn’t freeze up in great bergs of solid oxygen and nitrogen on the far side a billon years ago,” Liu said drily. “That and the fact that we are still breathing.”

“But it’s always good to have observational confirmation.”

As they pushed on the cloud cover broke up, quite abruptly, to reveal a star-crowded sky. The temperature plummeted, and frost gathered.

During one rest stop Yuri bundled himself up in thermal underwear and padded coat and over-trousers, and went out with the others to look at the sky.

“Funny thing,” he said. “I’ve never seen much of the stars, one way or another. When I was a kid, before the cryo, the night sky of Earth was a wash-out. Full of space mirrors and other orbital clutter, even away from the glow of city lights and the smog. You could see the stars from Mars, but we weren’t let out of the domes. And then, here on Per Ardua, the sun never set at all.”

“Drink it in, my friend,” Liu said. “Drink it in. You can’t beat the Alpha suns, can you?” A dazzling pair of diamonds, their light bright enough to cast shadows—bright enough, the ColU thought, to power some feeble photosynthesis.

Stef, meanwhile, was staring east. “Look. Can you see that?” It was a brilliant star, hanging low on the horizon.

“I see it,” murmured the ColU. “But a star of that magnitude does not feature in the constellation maps I have stored in my memory. A nova, perhaps?”

“We’d have heard of that,” Stef said. “I guess we’ll find out…”

Chapter 76

They drove on, over ground that was permanently frozen now. The ice was gritty and old, Stef pointed out; away from the terminator region, where the warm air spilled over into the dark and quickly dumped its vapour, fresh precipitation must be rare.

Ten days past the terminator zone the ColU called a halt, on an otherwise unremarkable plain of ice. “We are no longer over dry land,” it announced simply.

“I can confirm that,” Stef said quickly, inspecting ghostly radar images of a crumpled hidden surface beneath them. “This is the ocean, about where the Ad Astra maps indicated the shore should be. Just here it’s solid ice all the way to the ocean floor, which is no more than a dozen metres or so beneath us. Further out where the ocean is deeper we’re expecting liquid water under a crust of ice. The next landmass, and the antistellar, are thataway,” she said, pointing. “The driving should be easy, but let’s take it carefully.”

They drove on into the silent dark, the light of their floods splashing ahead. They adopted a new driving strategy now, out on the ice, for safety in these different conditions. The ColU and the rover drove not in a convoy but in parallel, with maybe a quarter of a kilometre between them. That way neither of them would fall into the same crevasse, at least, and they could better triangulate the position of any obstacles. The landscapes they had crossed, with all their intricate detail, had been replaced now by a smooth plain of ice. Cloud and mist were rare, and the brilliant, unwavering starlight hung over them. It was an eerie, featureless, timeless phase of the journey, Yuri thought. With barely a vibration from the rover’s smooth-running engine, with no sense of the ground transmitted through the vehicle’s sturdy suspension, for long periods it felt as if they weren’t moving at all.

But then they began to see icebergs, like tremendous ships, bound fast in the frozen sea. “Evidently,” the ColU said, “there are times when the ice melts enough for bergs to float across the open surface. During exceptional volcanic warming pulses, perhaps. But then the sea refreezes, trapping the bergs…”

Stef and the ColU seemed exhilarated by the confirmation of liquid water persisting under the ice. “It had to be there,” Stef said. “There is probably a global system of deep ocean currents, transporting heat right around the planet. Part of the water cycle too, probably, restoring some of the mass lost to the unending rain at the terminator. Had to be there. But it’s ground truth; you don’t know for sure until you see it.”

The workings of an invisible ocean were less than captivating for Yuri and Liu. In these changeless hours they dozed, watched the stars, and for the first time in his life Yuri learned to play chess.

Stef, meanwhile, spent a lot of time watching that strange eastern star rise in the sky, tracking its motion using images captured by her slate. More brilliant than any star save the Alpha twins, it was rising too quickly, she said. “So not a star at all,” she murmured. “Then what?”

On the seventy-first day the ColU called for a cautious slowdown. “We are approaching landfall…”

This was the single landmass they would encounter before the antistellar point, an Australia-size island continent that, according to the Ad Astra maps, lay between their terminator crossing point and the antistellar. They crept forward over the last of the sea pack ice, wary of its thinning, and then rolled up a shallow beach onto the land. Their floods picked out grimy ice beneath their treads, and low, eroded-looking hills, icebound, were shadows against the starry sky. They swung north and east, travelling in convoy once more.

Stef said, “There has to be an ice cap in the middle of this continent, even if it doesn’t show up in the Ad Astra data set. So we’re going to keep to the coastal fringe. If we get stuck we can always duck out onto the sea ice again.”

“Actually the air temperature is rising,” reported the ColU blandly.

After another half-day they came to a stretch of open, ice-free landscape, and they clambered out of the rover to explore. It was some kind of volcanic province, Yuri saw, with hot mud pools, and slicks of heat-loving bacteria that showed up a brilliant purple and green in their lights. So this was where the local warmth came from. Their breath steamed in the chill air, but Yuri could feel the warmth of the ground under his booted feet. They all wore head flashlights, which made them look like ghostly alien visitors in this calm, dreaming place. The ColU and Stef happily took samples and made images.

“Life all over,” Liu said.

“Everywhere you go,” Stef agreed. “There’s surely life even under the ice, on the bottom of the covered ocean, wherever there are hot springs, mineral seeps. The same as on Earth.”

“And stromatolites,” the ColU said.

“What?” Stef straightened up, sample bottle in hand. “Impossible. Not in the dark. You need photosynthesisers to build stromatolites.”

“But here they are,” the ColU said mildly.

It was true. Rising to the west of the bacteria garden, the landscape was covered with shapes like huge mushrooms, with broad tops and wide, deep stems anchored firmly to the ground.

They walked over. Stef stabbed a sampling tube into one big specimen, an unhesitating gesture that made Yuri wince, and extracted a cross-section sample that she inspected by the light of her head flashlight. “You’re right, ColU,” she said. “Kind of. This is a stratified bacterial community. The upper layers do look like they are photosynthesising—by Alpha light presumably, it must be a very slow process. But further down I think we have mineral chompers, like the heat lovers in the mud pools. Call it a stromatolite, then, but of a strange, complex sort.”

“And unimaginably ancient,” the ColU said. “There would be nothing to disturb them here. No predators. And all of this must be a kind of surface expression of the deeper community, the deep hot biosphere, which won’t care if it’s on the day side or the dark.”

Yuri grunted. “I wonder what they think of all the fuss we make up here, then.”

The party spent a day at the site, observing, gathering samples, reflecting and hypothesising. Then they packed up and moved on.

Chapter 77

The rumble of the heavy vehicles’ passing made the deep ground shudder, briefly.

This unusual event was detected by vast, diffuse senses. Aeon-long dreams were interrupted.

The event was noted, a record of it seeping out through the communities in the deep rocks, where it was interpreted, classified, stored. Nothing came as a surprise to a mind that had already been two billion years old before the first complex cell had arisen on this world.

The vehicles soon receded, the disturbance was over. And in the chthonic silence the Dream of the End Time resumed.

Chapter 78

Penny Kalinski woke to the sound of laughing children.

In her life, she’d been woken up worse ways, she supposed. Even if the world was threatening to implode around her.

She checked the clock. It was a little before seven fifteen, dome time. Or Paris local time, officially, but dome time was the way she thought of it; sealed up down here in Earthshine’s bunker, living off an enclosed life-support system, she may as well have been in some hab on Mercury or the moon.

She pushed her way out of bed and padded through to the small living room, where Jiang Youwei lay in his fold-out bed. Jiang was sleeping soundly. He would sleep even through an alarm—though the one time there had been a genuine problem in the months they’d spent buried down here, when a siren had sounded a warning of contaminants in the recycled air, he’d been on his feet in a second, his military training kicking in.

Penny went through to the bathroom, and stood under the hot, faintly stale-smelling water of the shower. They only had the two rooms, plus the bathroom; Earthshine had colonised only a small stretch of the old Channel tunnel, and living space, along with power, air, water and food, was always at a premium. At that they were privileged to have private quarters at all, not to have to share the big dormitories and shared bathrooms that had been set up to accommodate everybody else.

And the tunnel was crowded now. The inmates were mostly families of support staff and of Earthshine’s drafted-in experts, and the children, grandchildren and even a few great-grandchildren of Sir Michael King, hastily flown in after the Splinter break-up and the closing in of the long cold—the Mighty Winter, as Earthshine called it.

Mindful of limited resources, after a brief shower Penny cut the water and dried off briskly.

Back in the living room the lights were bright. Jiang was up and about, flipping through pages on his slate with a practised finger. He had set a pot of coffee brewing in their small galley corner. As she passed, he absently handed Penny a full mug.

She pulled her clothes out of their small closet. She wore ISF-issue coveralls, self-cleaning and self-repairing, and all she had to do was shake out the detached dirt every day, a great saving in laundry water. She asked Jiang, “Busy day?”

“Getting busier,” Jiang said, studying his slate. “Maintenance this morning, some diplomatic stuff around noon… I will have a late finish. You?”

“The school this morning, as I recall. After that—well, it depends on the Council resolution at lunchtime, and the fallout from that.” The latest phase of the ongoing Council of Worlds talks was due to report back today.

“Yes,” he said. “Big day. I guess I’ll see you there.”

Though they were tucked away down here in this hole in the ground, as guests of Earthshine they were intimately connected to developing world affairs. The bloodless war between China and the UN nations had moved to a new phase in the months since the Splinter had arrived at Earth, and its dust had plunged the world into a sudden winter. A few resulting border conflicts had been easily contained. To the chagrin of Sir Michael King the rebellion against Chinese rule in Australia had been stomped upon; since then martial rule had been imposed on that continent, and vast numbers of native Aussies had been shipped out to other Chinese provinces in Indonesia, and further afield.

Across the Earth, indeed across the solar system, a new, uneasy truce had been called, and it still held, just about.

But now a new round of talks had begun, under the nominal chairmanship of the three Core AIs, Earthshine among them, who had emerged from their reclusive hideaways to offer a neutral platform on which negotiations and attempts at conciliation could begin. These were the so-called “Council of Worlds” talks, usually restricted to the Earth but sometimes, in lengthy sessions incorporating time delays, with representations from Mercury, Mars, even Ceres. The chair was rotated mostly between Ifa and the Archangel, the AIs based in central Africa and South America respectively.

Sir Michael King, nearing his century but still in his chair at the head of UEI, was a key contributor. Penny had duties as an adviser on kernel physics. Jiang, one of the few Chinese down here in the tunnel, was expected to support the sessions with interpretation work, as well as reporting back personal impressions to New Beijing.

Well, the talks had ground on. Now there was a package of measures which seemed all but acceptable to most of the parties on the table: a mutual security pact; a tentative deal on the perpetual sticking point of the sharing of resources and information, including some Chinese access to kernel science; Earth to be designated a protectorate by both sides, the home of mankind ruled off-limits as a theatre of war. Whether any of it was going to be accepted was another question.

By the time Penny had finished her coffee, brushed her short hair, and was ready to go, Jiang had left already.

Outside, embedded in its tunnel, Earthshine’s little kingdom was beginning another day.

The big wall-mounted fluorescents, having been dimmed to match the waning of the daylight outside, were back up to full brightness. At this time of day people were on the move, a few night-shift workers standing down, the rest preparing for the labour of the day. Most of the work was maintenance of the systems that kept them all alive down here. A couple of the wall screens showed images from around a wintry planet, and on the rest there was a constant feed from the round-the-clock Council of Worlds talks.

Overall the big tunnel refuge had undergone a drastic and rapid transformation. When Penny had first arrived it had been little more than a kind of computer store, survival shelter and information node. Now, as the families had been moved in, the IT gear had been removed from the public areas, and living spaces had been set out: dormitory and toilet blocks, a small hospital, even a school for the kids.

And at this time, before the start of the working day, the school playground was full of noisy kids, climbing frames and rope swings, playing games like hopscotch, their voices echoing from the concrete walls of the tunnel. Penny watched them with a kind of wistfulness, part of her longing to shed the weight of her own decades and join in. But she noticed how pale they were, cooped up down here, cut off from fresh air and sunshine: a winterbound Paris, under its dismal dust-choked sky and riddled with refugees, wasn’t safe for children. The kids’ health was carefully monitored, but it seemed to Penny they were growing up with a kind of frantic energy that had to be burned off regularly, like a flare from a gas well.

“We have become like a space station, buried in the ground.” The grave voice was Earthshine’s. His virtual stood beside her dressed in the usual sober business suit.

Penny said, “I think we’ll have problems if we’re stuck down here too long. Up on Mars, say, you grow up knowing that there’s no escape. Whereas here the kids know there’s a liveable environment up there, outside. When they get older, if we’re still here, we’re going to have a lot of difficult teens.”

“Interesting. I retain enough of my humanity, I think, to sympathise. The need for personal freedom seems to be ingrained in the human animal, to some extent. We accept compromises where it benefits the family. Beyond that, we resent.”

She had to smile. “Is this how you talk to the kids in your school classes?”

“Not exactly—”

“Hey!” A little kid had come up to the fence before them; he had oriental features but a thick Australian accent. Without warning, he took a ball and threw it straight at Earthshine. The ball passed through Earthshine’s body unimpeded, but there was a spray of multicoloured pixels. Earthshine folded slightly with a grunt of discomfort, and his overall image flickered subtly as the consistency routines in his infrastructural software strove to recover.

The kid laughed and ran away. Earthshine, back to normal, smiled indulgently.

“Come on,” Penny said, irritated. They walked away from the playground. “You shouldn’t let them do that to you. It’s disrespectful.”

Earthshine shrugged. “Sooner that than they should fear me, my strange unreality. That is a key purpose of my presenting classes in the school, you know. We are selfish, we three of the Core. Sir Michael’s request to bring down his grandchildren with him changed all that, in a surprising way. Now I see it as my job to protect the children. In a way I think of all of you as family.”

This kind of interaction always seemed irritating and bizarre to Penny, as if Earthshine was trying to acquire humanity, and was telling her about it step by step in full detail. “Shouldn’t the children learn that it hurts when your consistency protocols are broken?”

“I can live with it,” Earthshine said heavily. “They will learn in time. Colonel Kalinski, I think you are mothering me again.”

That annoyed her. “What do you mean, again?”

“It does not hurt greatly to have a rubber ball thrown through my virtual projection. It did not hurt greatly when my nine parents were merged into one, and I was born. It does not hurt greatly to be me, even though I am not human as you are. You should not pity me.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

He had sounded stern, aloof, inhuman. Now he grinned, infectiously. “But it is pleasant to be mothered, I admit that. And now, I see, we’re overdue to meet Sir Michael.”

King stood beneath the largest of the display screens. Leaning on his stick, ignoring the human bustle around him, he glowered up at the news feeds.

The screen showed a blizzard of images, as usual, and voices competed in the air. Penny let the morning’s data rush wash over her in its multiple streams, gathering an impression of the new day. Maybe this was how it was for Earthshine all the time, she wondered.

She picked out a demonstration in Anchorage, outside the Chinese embassy, to the richest of all the USNA states in the early twenty-third century. The demonstration was, of course, about the effects of the Chinese asteroid winter. Food shortages were already kicking in, in this year without a summer. In the new, modern cities like Solstice in the far north and south, the power supply had collapsed as the paddies and marshlands, wired to supply electricity from gen-enged photosynthesis, had faltered in the shadows of the sky. There were even new refugee flows, heartbreakingly familiar images of families drifting back to the mid-latitude areas once abandoned by their parents or grandparents during the climate Jolts. Even in Paris, Penny had seen a refugee camp set up on the dead grass of the Tuileries.

“The Chinese got it wrong,” King growled as they approached. “If they wanted to make some gesture of space power they should have stuck to slamming a rock into the moon. But to strike at the Earth itself like this—it’s hit people at a visceral level. You know, there’s a theory that the whole scheme was cooked up offworld, in some think tank on Ceres or Mars, maybe by second-generation colonist types who have no real sympathy for the Earth, who don’t understand how things are down here. As a geopolitical statement it might have seemed a logical thing to do, a finely engineered stunt. But as a human gesture they got it completely wrong.”

“Well, not completely,” Earthshine murmured. “We are still talking; we have still avoided all-out war.”

“True. But that’s thanks to you and your siblings. And we’re not out of the woods yet.” As usual when he felt under pressure, King looked tense, angry; Penny had learned he got restless in any situation he wasn’t fully in control of. “The Council of Worlds session is about to make some kind of statement.” He glanced up at the screen. “Bah. Come with me.” He led the way towards his own quarters.

She followed, reluctantly. “We both have duties. The school—”

“What are you, Kalinski, suddenly some slave to routine? This is more important than anything else going on down here. And as for the school, Earthshine here can just send in a partial… Come on.”

Chapter 79

King’s quarters were like a villa, compared to the cramped single room Penny shared with Jiang. He had four roomy interconnected chambers, each fitted out with screens and decent furniture, as well as a luxurious bathroom and kitchen that Penny had only ever glimpsed. Then again, it had largely been King’s money and influence that had got this old tunnel up and running as a survival shelter so quickly; Earthshine had huge resources, but of a more specialised and distributed kind. Even Earthshine owed King favours.

As they entered, the room’s big display screen was dominated by a central image of an empty podium with a microphone stand, the centuries-old signal of a press conference waiting to happen. Penny wondered where the podium was, where this event was due to take place; it could be anywhere on the planet, even on the moon.

Penny took a seat alongside Earthshine. As ever, a servo-robot rolled around offering them coffees.

Penny asked, “So how far have they got?”

King sat upright on an armchair, hands wrapped around his walking stick. He glared at Earthshine. “He knows, better than I do, probably. Ask him. The UN Deputy Secretary General has a statement to make. Remember, you met her on Ceres.”

Penny was no politics junkie; she frowned, trying to think this through. “That means she’s making some kind of unilateral statement. Right? If she and the Chinese delegates aren’t appearing together. I’m guessing that’s not a good sign.”

“You wouldn’t think so, would you?” He glanced at his watch. “She’s overrunning. That’s probably a good sign, if they’re still talking. Or not. Ah, what the hell.” He rubbed his fleshy face, briefly seeming exhausted. Then he seemed to pull himself together with an effort. He turned on Penny. “So how are you?”

She grinned. “How do you think I am?”

“No word from your sister, I guess. Even now, at this time of crisis.”

She shrugged. “Why should there be? The news of all this won’t even reach Proxima for four years.”

“It’s a shame she’s so far away.”

She sensed he was probing for a reaction. She also sensed that he was only talking to fill up some blank time, before the Deputy Secretary General stepped up to that podium. “A shame, yeah.”

“Of course you must miss her. You’re twins. You were supposed to share your lives.”

She shrugged. “To Stef, in some sense I didn’t even exist before she stepped into the Hatch. By going off to Proxima the first chance she had, she was saying goodbye to me, loud and clear.”

“Tough break.”

“You could say that. We talked about this before. I’m too old now; I have a leathery hide.”

Earthshine, sipping his own virtual coffee, said gravely, “I believe I can sympathise. I remember being human, but I am no longer human. My consciousness can easily be modified, reworked, replayed, edited… As perhaps yours has, or your sister’s. It is your unique misfortune, Penelope Kalinski, yours and your sister’s, that your personal timeline has somehow been tangled up in the mysteries of kernel physics.”

Penny thought that over. “Thanks. I think.”

King winked at her again. “You’re here, in this room, with me. You’re real enough. Forget the existential crap. You’ll be fine—”

And now there was movement on the screen, and they turned to watch. The Deputy Secretary General, slim, smart, very sombre, stepped up, holding a slate. She began to speak, and English, Spanish, Russian and Chinese subtitles peppered the screen. But a headline strap at the bottom, scrolling by, was all Penny needed to know what had happened.

Earth was to be protected. That was the only agreed conclusion of talks which had once again broken down. Otherwise all bets were off. There was no declaration of hostilities, not yet, but—

Earthshine stood up. He flickered, oddly, as if massive processing resources were being diverted. “The talks are finished. There will be war. It is obvious, a Cold War logic, like the twentieth century. Each side now has an interest in striking first, before the other destroys its capability. Take me off Earth.”

Penny glanced at King, who was staring at the screen, ashen-faced; evidently this news was worse than he’d expected. He quickly pulled himself together, and looked up at Earthshine. “Very well. I have a ship. You can use it. But let my family stay here.”

Penny was astounded by the suddenness of these negotiations. “Off Earth? But…” But if anybody understood the implications of what was happening, this shadow play of delayed press conferences and ambiguous statements, it was these two. She thought it over, then stood up. “I’ll help you, Earthshine. I can continue to advise you. Take me with you, on the ship.”

Earthshine nodded. “Done.”

“And Jiang Youwei,” she added hurriedly.

“Agreed.”

Chapter 80

It had taken the expedition two weeks to skirt the island continent.

Then they cut away from the coast, and headed once more over the ice-covered ocean, the vehicles rolling smoothly side by side. In this flat emptiness, again Yuri’s sense of time seemed to dissolve. He dozed, watched the stars, and played chess with Liu. Whole days went by without him even leaving the rover cabin.

It was almost a surprise when the ColU called a warning that another landfall was imminent. After nearly a hundred days, more or less on schedule, they approached the rising ground of the frozen rock-tide bulge that supported the antistellar point.

They proceeded with caution, as ever. But this time they wouldn’t stick to the coast; they were heading for the heart of this peculiar star-born continent. Soon the vehicles were clambering up onto the rising flanks of an ice sheet, with the summits of worn mountains protruding, shadows in the starlight. The ColU led the way, nosing through passes, pushing ahead on stretches of open country. The ColU said it was navigating using the stars, as well as its own internal dead-reckoning gyroscopic systems, feeling its way towards the precise antistellar point, the summit of this ice cap.

Stef, meanwhile, became increasingly fascinated by the anomalous star-that-wasn’t-a-star that hung high in the sky above. Eventually, almost as they arrived at the substellar point, it occurred to her to examine its light with a spectroscope.

She immediately called a halt.

They pulled on their cold-weather gear, clambered out onto the ice, and stood together, peering up at the star, almost directly overhead. Stef held up a mittened hand, holding a small radio transmitter.

Yuri stood with her. “Tell me, then. What about your star?”

“It’s not a star at all. I think I know what it is. All this way I watched it rise, like a naked-eye astronomer five hundred years ago. I was puzzled. It just didn’t fit… Finally I checked it out spectroscopically.” She pointed upwards. “That’s Proxima light.”

Yuri did a double-take. He looked up. “It can’t be. Oh. Yes, it can—reflected, right? Then it’s a mirror.”

“Or a solar sail. Something like that. Yes.”

“But it’s just hanging there. How come it’s not in orbit?”

“I think it’s at an equilibrium point. The pressure of Proxima’s light, pushing it away, is balanced by the pull of gravity, drawing it in. I’m not sure it’s stable, but with some conscious management—”

“Conscious? You know what this is?”

“I think so. Excuse me.” She raised her radio. “Come in, Angelia. I think I have the right frequency…”

“I am Angelia 310999,” came a faint reply, a female voice, a kind of clipped accent very like Stef’s own. “Hello, Stephanie. It is good to see you again. I remember our time on Mercury very well.”

Yuri and Lu just stared, at Stef, at the bauble hanging in the sky.

“We’ve both come a long way from Mercury. Although nobody calls me Stephanie any more. In fact, they didn’t back when I last spoke to you, I’m Stef to my friends… Can you see us?”

“Oh, yes. Your vehicles are quite clearly visible; my optical systems continue to function well. Although I could not identify you, of course, until you spoke to me. How is your father?”

“Passed away, I’m afraid, Angelia. Long ago.”

“Ah. He was a visionary, though morally flawed.”

“Yes. Angelia, I can see that you succeeded in your mission.”

“It was very difficult. Much was lost.”

“Why didn’t you report to Earth? Why not contact the Ad Astra, when it arrived?”

“It did not contact me.”

“I doubt they even noticed some defunct lightsail space probe,” Liu murmured.

“Less of the ‘defunct’,” Angelia snapped.

Liu, surprised, laughed.

“Stef, humanity did nothing for me. I, and my equally sentient sisters, were thrown into the fire in the hope that a handful of us would succeed in a mission ordained by others.”

“Hm,” Yuri said. “Sounds familiar.”

“Why should I obey the orders of those who intentionally harmed me and my sisters?”

Liu rolled his eyes at Yuri. “Another bit of too-smart AI. Why do these things never do what they are supposed to?” Shaking his head he walked away, tentatively exploring, pushing deeper into the dark, his flashlight casting a glow on the ice at his feet.

Stef said, “All right, Angelia. I guess I understand. My father had his problems, but he was still my father. Our father, I guess. And you were one sibling I never resented.”

“Stef? I don’t understand that last remark. I remember how you and your sister, Penelope—”

“Never mind. Long story. We’ll talk about it some other time. Angelia, what are you doing up there?”

“It is a good place for me to stay. Me and my surviving sisters. Obviously it is a point of stability. And we serve a purpose.”

“A purpose?”

“Lighting the way to the point very close to where you stand. The antistellar. The most significant point on the planet.”

Yuri looked up again. “It is?”

Stef said, “So we didn’t really need to navigate, did we? All we had to do was look for you. Follow the star. Just like Bethlehem.”

“And of course I sought out the one who came before me…”

“Who do you mean?”

Liu came running back, breathing hard. “You need to come. I found something. Get the rover.”

Chapter 81

They bundled back into the rover, and the ColU followed. They’d only travelled a short way when, picked out in the vehicles’ lights, they all saw something ahead, on the ice, picked out by Liu’s ageing but still sharp eyes.

A flag, hanging limp on a pole. UN blue.

They pulled the vehicles up short, suited up, and climbed out onto the ice once more. The air was bitterly cold, and their breath misted around their heads. The three of them stood side by side, illuminated by the lights of the rover and the ColU.

And before them, clearly visible in the glow of the lights, was the flag, and what looked like a tent, slumped. Beyond the tent the ice surface fell away, perhaps into some kind of crater. None of them had an idea what any of this meant.

They walked forward, over hard, rough ice. The ColU followed, its lights dipped. The flag was fixed to a kind of improvised ski pole, stuck in the ice. They walked past it, staring.

At the tent, Yuri lifted a flap, stiff with ice. In the light of his hand torch he saw a body, inside the tent. He stepped back.

Wordlessly, Liu went inside to inspect the body.

Yuri and Stef walked around the rest of the site. Aside from the tent, there was a heap of scattered equipment on a frozen groundsheet, a pair of homemade-looking skis, a kind of improvised ice-bike, a heap of stores—and a gadget about a metre tall with an inlet hopper, an outlet compartment that looked like a miniature intensive-care chamber, and finely inscribed instructions on the casing.

“What’s this?” Yuri asked. “Some kind of iron cow?”

“Not that,” said the ColU.

Liu called them over.

Reluctantly they returned to the tent, where Liu stood over the body. It was a man. He lay wearing only an antique military uniform, no protective clothing. There was no sign of decay. But then, Yuri realised, he must have frozen solid before the bacteria in his body could have begun to consume him—and on Per Ardua, there was nothing yet that could consume a human corpse. The very processes of death were alien, on this alien world.

The dead man bore a UN roundel on his sleeve. A sheen of ice lay over his features. He was smart, clean-shaven, even his hair combed. He looked like an astronaut.

Stef said, “I guess he wanted to die in his uniform, huh.”

Liu looked at her. “You know who this is?”

“I know who it has to be.”

“Dexter Cole?” Yuri asked. The pioneer who had come to Proxima on some wild solo mission, half-baked even compared to the Ad Astra venture, in the decades Yuri had slept away in cryo.

“Yes. There is identification here.”

They all backed out of the tent.

Yuri said, “The colonists used to think Cole’s ghost was roaming around Per Ardua. Remember that, Liu?”

“I guess we might have been right about that.”

“So what happened to him?”

Liu pointed to a heap of paper he’d gathered together on the ice. “He left a journal. A video diary too. But there’s also a letter, one page.” He held this up in his gloved hand. “The bullet-point summary. Evidently he wanted to be sure we got the message. He did what he had to do. He says that, over and over. I guess he didn’t want to be remembered a failure. Or worse.”

Stef said, “He did what he had to do? What does that mean? He evidently made it to the Prox system. He was the first human to cross interstellar space, the first to land on Per Ardua. He’ll be remembered for that.”

“Yes,” said Liu. “But he was actually here to colonise, remember. It went wrong—according to the note. He crashed, somewhere on this dark side, the frozen side. He had no comsat, he couldn’t even send a message home to say what had happened. Much of his equipment was wrecked. He seems to have improvised all this gear. A kind of ski-bike, to get around on the ice. He hauled everything else after him.”

“He came here, to the antistellar,” Stef said. “Why?”

“He wanted to be found, or his body anyhow. He knew he couldn’t make it to the near side. Where else are people going to come, on the dark side? We zoomed straight here. He wanted people to know his story. And he didn’t want to be thought of as a monster.”

Yuri frowned. “Why the hell would anyone think that?”

Liu kicked the processing gadget. “This isn’t an iron cow, not a food machine. Dexter Cole was supposed to be the father of a whole colony. That was the idea. The strategy was that he would bring human embryos, frozen in here, that he’d thaw out one by one, and feed up, and raise. Twenty little colonists in the light of Proxima, with Cole as the godfather. That was the vision.”

“Instead of which…”

“Instead of which he was lost in the dark, and starving. He grew the embryos, all right. He must have found nutrients somewhere to feed the incubator—volcanic pools, I guess. But what he did with them…”

“Oh, God.” Stef knelt on the groundsheet, by the machine. She picked up something from the floor—a heap of white fragments, like a tiny builders’ midden, Yuri thought. Bones. Finger bones, perhaps. Stef put them respectfully back where she’d found them.

Yuri looked down at the dead man’s stern, placid features, and wondered how sane he had been, in the end, alone in the icy dark with his only food source, this grisly repast.

Liu shrugged. “What would you have done? What would any of us do? The kids couldn’t have survived here anyhow.”

The ColU said evenly, “That’s not all he did here, though. I have inspected the wider area. Dexter Cole did more than just survive. There’s something else here. In the ice, I mean. Something he found.”

They looked at each other. Then they hurried over to the ColU, which was standing at the lip of the depression in the ice.

It wasn’t a natural formation, nothing like a crater. It was a pit. Cole had blown a pit in the ice. And at the bottom, it looked like he had got to work with a pick of some kind. He had exposed a sheet of a grey metal-like substance, and a fine circular seam, a few metres across.

“Dexter Cole evidently became curious,” the ColU said. “About this place, the antistellar, a point of obvious significance. Perhaps he retained some equipment from his crashed ship. He may have detected structures beneath the ice, with radar or sonar echoes. And he certainly had explosives.”

They all scrambled down into the shallow depression. The ColU rolled forward, playing its lights over them.

“A Hatch,” Yuri said. “He only found another fucking Hatch, ColU!”

“Yes. And diametrically opposite the first, at the substellar Hub. Also there is a field of kernels, buried in the rock of this area.”

“What is going on with these Hatches?”

Stef knelt and pointed, grinning. “Look. Hand-shaped lock grooves. We can open this.”

Liu stared. Then he held up Cole’s one-sheet missive, scanning it quickly. “Cole says this was featureless when he found it. He even made a sketch. Look. He took images on his slate, he says. No hand marks.”

“Then it changed,” Yuri said. “Just as the day side Hatch changed when we first went into it.”

“And the one on Mercury, the same,” Stef said.

Yuri looked at her. “What are we going to do about it?”

She grinned. “What do you think?”

Liu backed away, hands raised. “Whoa. You’re talking about going into that thing? Count me out.”

The ColU said, “I think it is my duty to point out that you are entirely unprepared, Yuri Eden.”

“That never stopped us before.”

“True. But there may not even be breathable air on the other side. Consider Mercury—”

“We’re going anyhow.” He grinned at Stef, who grinned back. “We’re done with Per Ardua, aren’t we? Done with Earth. Especially if they import their war here.”

The ColU stood still, its floods splashing light over the Hatch in its pit. “You are determined.”

“That’s right.”

“In that case I have a request.”

“What’s that?”

“Take me with you.”

Stef laughed briefly, but fell silent again.

For a moment nobody spoke.

Stef said, “It’s serious, isn’t it?”

Liu snorted. “This is a glorified tractor. A farming machine.”

“Not just that,” said the ColU. “I am a sentient, curious entity. I too wish to know what lies beyond this latest Hatch. And I have a store of knowledge, data… Imagine how useful a companion I could be, Yuri Eden.”

Stef said, “But how the hell are you going to get through the Hatch anyhow? You’re not modular, like the modern designs, so you can’t be carried through in pieces, or even climb through yourself. You wouldn’t fit.”

“I would suggest you detach my central processing core. That would suffice. Interfaces can be arranged later. Even a slate would be enough for that.”

Stef looked at Yuri. “We’re going to do this, aren’t we?”

Yuri just grinned. “I owe you one for Mister Sticks, ColU. You’d better show us how to take you apart.”

They took a day to prepare, to don layers of clothing, to pack rucksacks, to select weapons.

And to detach the ColU’s processor core, under its own instructions, as if it were supervising its own lobotomy, and to load it gingerly into a pack which Yuri wore on his chest. It was like cradling a baby, he thought, like the papooses he and Mardina had made to carry Beth when she was very small.

Then it was time to go. After a day, for both Stef and Yuri, the immediate impulse to leave that they’d both felt on finding the Hatch stayed strong.

Still Liu hung back. “Are you sure about this? I’ve never been through one of these damn things. You could end up anywhere, right?”

“That’s the fun part,” Stef said.

Yuri looked at Liu. “We’re sure. And you’re sure you want to stay?”

“Yeah. I’ll take my chances with the UN. And besides, staying on this side of that Hatch is the only way I’ll keep open some remote chance of getting to Thursday October again. But you two—Stef, if you do this you’ll never see your family again. Your twin.”

Stef just laughed. “Some loss.”

“And you, Yuri. Maybe there’s a chance with Beth—”

“I know Mardina. And I know with stone certainty that I’ll never see Beth again, come what may.”

Liu nodded. “So you may as well keep going, right?”

“Through another door, yeah. And another. What else is there?”

“I’ll tell them what became of you.”

Yuri grinned. “Well, maybe we’ll be back to tell it all ourselves.”

“You really think so?”

“No.” He turned to Stef. “Are you ready?”

“Always.” She pulled off her mittens, exposing hands, stretched her fingers wide. “Let’s do this quickly. It’s so cold.”

“True enough,” said Yuri, pulling off his own mittens. “Are you ready? Together then. One, two, three—”

Opened up, the Hatch was just like the one between the Hub and Mercury, a pit under the hatch lid, another door on the wall with indentations for their hands, lit up by a sourceless pearly light.

Yuri and Stef climbed down, using a rope held by Liu. Yuri moved carefully, protective of the ColU.

Opening the door in the wall was easy. They walked through into an intermediate chamber, just like in the Mercury Hatch, with doors on either side. It was so warm in here they immediately started pulling open their winter-weather gear.

They looked at each other. The door back to Per Ardua was still open, but Liu was already out of sight, beyond the outer chamber, on the surface.

“Do it,” said Stef.

Yuri shut the door. Then they crossed together to the second door, and laid their hands in the cuttings in its surface.

As the door opened they both stumbled. The gravity had shifted again.

Committed, Yuri thought.

Chapter 82

As the hot war loomed, it took three days for King to secure Earthshine’s ship.

The Tatania, an untested upgrade of the Ad Astra but one of the UN’s few hulk craft capable of interstellar travel, was diverted to the moon. There Earthshine, or at least a downloaded copy, would be picked up and fired off into deep space as fast as the hulk was capable of driving him. Whether he intended to go as far as the stars was not yet clear.

“Maybe he’ll just hang around in orbit around Pluto until the fuss dies down,” Sir Michael King said cynically. King himself, having gathered his family around him, intended to weather the storm in the bunker under the Channel. “I’ll soon be a hundred bloody years old,” he’d said. “I’m done running.”

It was a reasonable deal to make, Penny thought. A partial version of Earthshine’s own persona was going to stay behind in the great stores he’d established there, so the refuge would continue to function; why not let King and his family stay too?

For herself, Penny remained determined to flee with Earthshine. Sooner that than huddle in a hole in the ground, cowering from the fire of an interplanetary war. And Earthshine was determined to go. That was what swung it for Penny, in the end. Penny wondered what he knew about this war that she didn’t—what he knew, or feared. Anyhow, staying at his side struck her as a good survival strategy just now.

And she wanted Jiang to come with her. He was as much of a friend to her as anybody. He, however, wasn’t at all sure that it was wise to flee on an experimental ship at a time of interplanetary war. Maybe staying buried in the ground was safer. But his own position was difficult, as a Chinese national in UN territory. Penny, with support from King, had already had to fend off official calls for his internment. If he stayed here, he’d probably lose his liberty—assuming they survived at all. In the end the choice for him was logical enough.

So they prepared to leave. The last Penny saw of the Channel bunker was Sir Michael King’s crumpled, surprisingly tearful face as he said goodbye at the elevator shaft, with his youngest daughter alongside him.

They flew to Kourou, landing in blasting heat despite the Splinter’s Mighty Winter, where they would catch a shuttle to orbit.

They had time to spare. For now this strange, covert, half-declared war seemed to be developing at its own chthonic pace, as the Chinese moved their spacegoing assets into position to make what everybody assumed was going to be a wave of attacks on UN installations on the moon and near-Earth space, or at least to threaten such attacks. Chinese spacecraft were beautiful but slow; it was an armada that moved only a little faster than the pace at which the planets shifted across the sky. Deeper in space, probably, UN ships were similarly closing in on their own targets. Penny imagined a solar system full of huge energies eager to be unleashed—of command chains compromised by the long minutes of lightspeed delays in communications across interplanetary space.

But slow-paced or not war seemed to be on the way, and a new long countdown started in the head of everybody on Earth who followed the news.

And they needed the time. It seemed to take an age to arrange the uploading of Earthshine—or a decent partial that was, it seemed, ultimately destined to become the primary copy—into a compact, high-density portable store, a unit small enough to fit into the Earth-to-orbit shuttle. Penny had wondered why Earthshine could not simply be loaded digitally into some store on the hulk ship. Well, this unit was the answer to that; it was a technology she’d not encountered before, a technology no doubt protected by layers of corporate secrecy and government black research—a technology of which Penny Kalinski, a physicist who had advised the top levels of the UN, knew precisely nothing.

At last the orbital shuttle, sitting on its tail at the Kourou field, was loaded up and ready to go. As she boarded Penny was aware of the significance, that this could be her last footstep on Earth, but mostly she was just grateful to get out of the heat.

They lay on their backs in their rows of couches, Penny beside Jiang. Earthshine was here too, a virtual projection in a seat just ahead of Penny, in the cabin with them as a gesture of shared humanity, he said. But his image flickered continually; his base persona in the tunnel under the English Channel was continuing to download material into the store aboard the shuttle, and would do so, Penny understood, as long as the comms links survived.

Without warning the automated shuttle leapt from the ground. Penny felt acceleration press her hard into her couch. Beyond the windows the sky darkened quickly to a velvet blue-black, and as the shuttle banked Penny glimpsed the Earth, a curved horizon against the black.

It took only minutes to reach orbit, and Penny felt a vast regretful relief to be off the planet at last. So far so good.

But here they stalled. It was going to take half a day for a translunar ferry ship to catch up with them, and even then it would be more chemical rocketry aboard the ferry that would take them to the moon. Despite the urgency of the looming war, all of Earthshine’s influence, and all of Sir Michael King’s money, even now no kernel technology was allowed closer to Earth than Penny’s own old lab on the far side of the moon. Penny Kalinski still couldn’t get from Earth to moon any faster than the standard three days.

Stranded in Earth orbit for these long hours, Penny watched the planet unravel below, the daylight side as bright as a Florida sky. From this perspective the Mighty Winter had made little difference: a few more lights glowing in the heart of the old, largely abandoned low-latitude cities, and glaciers reforming in the mountains, splashes of white against the crumpled grey of the rock. What she definitively didn’t see was any sign of war. No armies on the move, no cities burning, no missile sparks flying. And that was remarkable, when you reflected that China and the nations it had co-opted into its Greater Economic Framework faced an enemy over just about every border. Even as the two blocs prepared to batter each other in the sky, the surface of the home planet was left untouched.

“For now, anyhow,” Penny said when she discussed this with the others.

“You sound cynical,” Jiang Youwei said. “There is an agreement. It is a question of honour.”

“Honour?” Earthshine replied. “No. It is a question of madness. If war is insane, to fight a kind of partial war with rules is even more insane. To smash everything up, if you are going to act at all—that ought to be your intention, or at least your threat. Otherwise there is no disincentive to fight; there is no overriding desire for peace.”

Penny grunted. “I follow your logic. But you’ve rarely sounded less human, Earthshine.”

At last their lunar ferry arrived, and they transferred. Like the Earth-to-orbit shuttle, there was no human pilot aboard—no crew at all save a solitary steward with paramedic training, there to dish out prepacked meals, keep the lavatory clean, and deal with any heart attacks in transit. They left orbit, left Earth. But Penny looked back, all the way.

And on the second day of the flight, halfway to the moon, she saw fire at last: sparks flaring all around the equator of the Earth, but offset from the planet. She woke up Jiang, who was dozing. The passengers, and the steward, pressed their faces to the small windows, trying to see.

“Orbital assets being taken out,” Jiang guessed. “The Chinese are attacking UN stations in space, and presumably vice versa.”

“But there are no missile trails. They aren’t being attacked from the ground, by either side.”

“No. From orbit only. Nothing to connect the war in the sky to the protected Earth. And—oh, look!”

It was a Chinese junk, its filmy sail casting a pale shadow across the face of the Earth, clearly visible even from a couple of hundred thousand kilometres out.

“So it begins,” was Earthshine’s only comment.

On the third day the news got worse. The real fighting had started.

It had begun on Mars. Nobody seemed sure precisely what had been the final trigger—there were scattered reports of a remote Chinese base, intended for the nuclear mining of aquifer water, being destroyed by one of its own weapons. An act of UN sabotage maybe—well, that seemed to be the working assumption. In response Chinese troops had marched into the UN’s Martian enclaves, like Eden, more or less unopposed. Mars was now China’s, overall, but UN guerrilla forces out on the rusty plains had already mounted retaliatory strikes against Chinese emplacements. Mars was a big planet on a human scale, and empty; it would be a slow-burning battleground. However, just as Earth as a whole would be preserved, both sides had agreed to leave Mars’s greatest monument, Obelisk, untouched. Earthshine shook his head at this fresh gesture of foolish sentimentality.

Then they heard that some of the Chinese junks, having looped around the Earth, were heading for the moon. Another countdown clock started ticking in Penny’s head. Could Earthshine’s party land on the moon, board the waiting interplanetary hulk craft, get away, all before the Chinese struck?

On the fourth day, as the ferry prepared for its landing on the moon, news came of a fresh development: an attempted UN assault on Ceres, with hulk ships that had been stationed there, under stealth cover, for months. But the situation was complex. It turned out that the ships had already been heavily infiltrated by Chinese agents. When the attack on the asteroid began, some of the UN ships had turned on their fellows, disabling them, in one case destroying. And then the Chinese at Ceres, having taken control of the surviving hulks, evidently following a preplanned design, began using the remaining vessels to build—something.

Penny followed the news as best she could, a fog of partial reports, silences, and probably downright lies, whose opacity only increased her gathering sense of dread.

Chapter 83

The landing on the moon was astonishing.

The passengers were told nothing about what was to come, not before the craft entered its approach orbit and came dipping down towards the satellite’s crumpled landscape, under a jet-black sky. Through the thick round window beside her seat Penny watched crater-rim mountains reach up like claws.

She grabbed Jiang’s hand; she couldn’t help it. “We’re going hellish low.”

He shrugged. “There is no reason why not. No atmosphere on the moon, remember. You can dip an orbit as low as you like—”

The craft passed through another mountain shadow.

“—as long as you don’t hit anything in the process.”

“As long as? Youwei, we’re lower than the mountains, and still at interplanetary velocities.”

Earthshine grinned. “This is what you get when you hand over control of your life to an AI. I mean to the automated pilot of this craft, not a relatively empathetic, quasi-human individual such as myself. The sky is full of Chinese warships, remember, which are closing in on the moon. The craft has undoubtedly been given the overriding instruction to bring us down as quickly as possible, and that is what it is doing. This is an exercise in orbital geometry, not reassurance.”

“So how is it planning to land us?”

“We will soon find out…”

The attitude thrusters banged. The craft lurched, down and sideways, throwing the passengers around in their couches. Jiang squeezed Penny’s hand harder. She glimpsed the landscape of the moon fleeing past her window, crater rims, a sharp, close-by horizon. Then it was as if something grabbed at the shuttle—silently, smoothly, with no crude mechanical coupling, but the craft was held firm. And the deceleration was sudden, fierce, face forward, so she was thrust into her harness. Still there was barely any noise, only the high-pitched whine of fans, the passengers’ ragged breathing. The deceleration, the pressure of the harness on her chest, went on and on.

“The sling,” Jiang said now, through a grimace of discomfort.

“The what?”

“A mass driver. A launch rail, wrapped around the curve of this world, like Ceres. We have come skimming down from our transfer orbit to touch it, almost. It has grabbed us with its magnetic field. The sling is slowing us down, the reverse of the way it is generally used to hurl payloads from a standing start off into space.”

“A hell of a way to land a crewed spacecraft.”

Jiang shrugged. “It is not routinely used, but there have been piloted trials to test the technique. It is only a question of orbital geometry.”

“To an AI, maybe.”

“The only reason it is not used more often is because it defies human instinct.”

“I’ll say. If anything went wrong—”

“It would not, it could not—”

“Stop arguing,” Earthshine said now. The shuttle was sliding to rest, the deceleration easing. “It doesn’t matter any more. We’re down. Now we have to face what comes next.” He pointed out of a port.

Penny looked, and saw a hulk, a kernel-drive craft, a tall, fat cylinder standing on squat legs on the lunar surface. The craft stood on a smooth, hardened apron, a rough disc with ragged edges. Fuel pipes trailed up to sockets on the body of the ship, and fat-wheeled supply trucks rolled by. The sun was low, off to the left—she had no idea if it was lunar morning or evening in this place—and the rocket cast a long shadow. It was like some pre-Apollo dream of space flight, a crude rocketship.

The ferry at last slid to a halt. Penny heard mechanical clamps clatter closed, to pin the hull safely in place on the sling rail.

The passengers immediately began to unbuckle. A bus raced across the lunar surface towards them, throwing up rooster tails of dust. Penny stood up, her head swimming in the low lunar gravity. There was no time to think. Earthshine was right. She just had to put the scary trauma of the landing out of her head, and face whatever came next.

Earthshine flickered, looked up at Penny with a wistful smile, then imploded in a shower of evanescent, evaporating pixels. Shut down for the transfer, she guessed.

There was a bang on the hull, and the hatch slid open, to reveal a short tunnel to the bus. An ISF officer, a young woman, stood in the door. “Come. Please.” Once they were aboard the bus, the ISF woman urged them to sit down and strap in.

The bus detached quickly and rolled away across the lunar surface, making some speed. The bus was insubstantial, little more than a blister of some transparent substance over a low cart with a couple of rows of seats, and when its wheels hit one of the shallow craters that littered the lunar ground, it floated up off the surface like a toy. Grimly Penny clung to a rail on the back of the seat in front of her. She wondered if this fragile little vehicle was meant for taking tourists around Tranquillity or one of the other museum sites.

But they were making fast progress, heading straight for the base of that kernel-powered rocketship. Penny saw a truck offloading white cargo boxes in protective pallets for transfer to the ship, the essence of Earthshine being transferred to his interplanetary chariot, perhaps. The whole operation had a scary air of improvisation.

“I don’t recognise this place,” she said to Jiang. “And I thought I knew the moon. I worked here long enough.”

“All of this has been assembled quickly, and largely in secret. Even the kernel ship’s landing pad.” He grinned at her. “Can you guess how the pad was made?”

She looked again at the disc of ground on which the ship stood. “It looks like a sheet of basalt… oh.”

“Yes. The ship made it itself. I have seen images of it; General McGregor, who is our pilot, had the ship hover over the lunar ground.”

McGregor? That name was familiar. “And the downwash of the kernel-physics jets melted the dust.”

“That’s the idea. We live in a remarkable time, Penny, when such stunts are possible. Adventure-story stuff.”

She was less impressed; the whole thing struck her as showing off.

She was distracted by a ripple of light in the sky. A Chinese junk, it had to be. Once in space the hulk ship would be able to outpace any such craft, but it was vulnerable while on the ground; a rock thrown down at interplanetary speeds would split that squat hull like an eggshell. “We might only have minutes,” she murmured.

“I know,” Jiang said. “Everything is under control.”

She thought he deserved a sceptical glance for that.

The bus skidded sideways and fairly threw itself at a docking port in the base of the hull, meeting it with millimetre-scale precision. More scary unhesitating AI navigation.

Beyond the port was a small chamber, brightly lit, with what looked like a door to an elevator shaft beyond. Within, two people were waiting for them, a male ISF officer, and a civilian woman—and to her surprise Penny recognised them both.

The woman, in her late thirties, slim, dark, lost-looking, was Beth Eden Jones: a human native of a different star system, returned to Sol by a trick of alien technology. One of the most famous faces in the solar system, probably, unmistakable with that barbaric tattoo, and staring back at Penny. Beth snapped, “What? I just got here too. What are you staring at?”

Penny flinched. “Sorry. It’s just—I know you. I’m Colonel Penelope Kalinski, ISF.” She held out a hand, which wasn’t taken. “You met my sister on Mercury when—”

“I don’t care.” She turned to the man beside her. “How do I get off this thing?”

Taller, with a spectacular shock of silver-grey hair, in his seventies perhaps, the ISF man looked down at her with a kind of exasperated weariness. “You don’t, I’m afraid. None of us do. As ought to have been explained to you. All aboard? Close that hatch.” Automated systems responded.

As soon as the chamber was sealed up Earthshine flickered into existence, blinking, solidifying, clarifying in a whir of pixels. He looked down at his hand, flexed it, touched his face. “I have successfully interfaced with the ship’s systems, it seems. That was quick.”

“We are the ISF, sir,” said the officer. He bowed, which was the correct protocol with virtual representations, and Earthshine bowed back. “Welcome aboard the good ship Tatania. I’m General Lex McGregor, ISF; I’m to be your pilot. We have a small crew whom you’ll meet in due course. Now we must get on. If you’ll accompany me to the bridge…”

The door behind him slid open to reveal an elevator cage, and they crowded in. Soon they were riding up the axis of the craft. Earthshine lost no definition inside the elevator, no protocol-violation flinches, no blurring of pixels. Good interfacing indeed, Penny thought.

McGregor grinned at her, handsome despite his age. “So. Kalinski.”

“Lex. Good to see you again.”

“I’ve followed your career with interest all these years. And your sister. Nobody who flies a kernel ship can be unaware of the papers published under the Kalinski names, jointly or otherwise.”

“Depends which reality stream you’re talking about.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Never mind.” She said to the others, “The General and I go back a long way, to Mercury. My sister and I were about eleven years old, and my father was preparing to launch his Angelia probe to Alpha. And you—”

“And I was on the maiden voyage of the International-One. Just a snot-nosed kid at the time.”

Earthshine glanced over his spotless uniform. “I doubt you were ever snot-nosed, General McGregor.”

Beth Eden Jones glared at them all, furious, frustrated, killing the small talk with her sheer hostility.

The elevator slowed to a halt, and the door slid open. Penny found herself on what was obviously a bridge, with a big command chair surrounded by banks of consoles. There were no windows, and the lights were subdued so the illumination of the control panels was bright. A couple of crew members, young, one male, one female, in ISF uniforms, were already working steadily through a series of checks. There was an air of calm, of order, as if they were in a tremendous clockwork device ticking through programmed motions.

Penny recognised one item of decoration: the bizarre concrete panel that had once adorned the wall of Earthshine’s office in Paris, much eroded and incised with circles and grooves, now fixed to the wall of a starship. Penny had no idea what its significance was.

Lex McGregor hurried to his control couch. “We launch momentarily. Please strap yourselves in.” He waved at a bank of couches against one wall. “I know it’s all rather a rush, we haven’t even shown you around the ship—well, we’ll have time for that once we’re on our way. To give you a sense of the hasty timing, the passenger buses that brought you aboard are still nuzzled up against the ship. Poor little beasts will be atomised when we lift. But given the proximity of those Chinese warships—we must get away safely, that’s the only priority. Please, sit down and strap in, do hurry.”

They made for the couches, all save Beth Eden Jones, who stood in the middle of the cabin, hands on hips. “This is insane. Stop your count. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’m very much afraid that you are.” McGregor, already working through his own countdown checks, glanced over his shoulder. “Mr Jiang, I wonder if you could help?”

Jiang nodded, walked over to Beth and took her arm. “The ship will launch whether you are seated or not. If you are not strapped in you may come to harm. Please.” Gently, firmly, he pulled her towards the couches.

She followed, but she kept protesting. “This is ridiculous. It’s all been chaos since I got stuffed into that Hatch with my parents at the Hub on Ardua. I wanted to go back with my father, but my mother put a stop to that.” Her voice became harsher, more resentful. “I was stuck in this damn cluttered system with your big ugly overbright sun, your stupid crowded worlds full of ruins and skinny people and useless, distracting tech… And now this.” Jiang got her to a couch and started coaxing her to sit. “I was with my mother on Mercury, the big ISF plant at Caloris. They took me away in cuffs!”

McGregor, distracted, murmured, “Your mother was rather insistent. She believes it’s for the best, you know. She wants to keep you safe, that’s all.”

“Safe from what? What the hell’s going to happen to Mercury?”

“I’ve no real idea. My security clearance isn’t that high. I imagine your mother was making educated guesses, when she asked me to ensure your safety—”

“What’s it got to do with you?”

McGregor grimaced. “Ancient history. She said I owed her a favour. On balance I decided she was right. Are you strapped in?”

“She is,” Jiang said, settling in his own couch beside Penny and the Earthshine virtual.

“Then we’re all set. On my mark—thirty, twenty-nine…”

The craft shuddered, rocking Penny sideways in her couch. “What the hell was that? An earthquake?”

“I doubt it.” McGregor touched a panel.

One of the screens filled up with a visual feed. The lunar plain was sharp to the horizon. And in the black sky above there was a ripple of light, reflections of moonlight washing over a roughly spherical panel.

“More junks,” Earthshine said.

“Yep. And they’ve already started hurling down rocks. As if getting their range. They know we’re here, that’s for sure. Well, they’re too late. Seven, six… Now they’re going to need to concentrate on getting out of our way. Full acceleration coming. Two, one—fire!”

The whole ship shuddered. Suddenly a full Earth gravity was sitting on Penny’s chest, pressing her back in the couch. On the big screen, the lunar landscape whipped out of sight, leaving only a black sky, a star field that shifted as the ship rolled on its axis. As the ship lifted, the ride smoothed out quickly.

“Tatania is under way,” said Lex McGregor softly. Penny saw him clench his gloved fist in triumph.

Penny found herself thinking of Beth’s mother. Mardina Jones, an ISF officer abandoned by the fleet to become a baby machine on Per Ardua. And now here she was dispatching her only daughter off into deep space. That must have been a hell of a wrench, Penny thought. What did Mardina know? What did she see coming, that she wanted to save her daughter from so badly?

The craft shuddered, and the acceleration bit deeper, making her gasp. Once again Penny grabbed Jiang’s hand, and he squeezed tight.

Chapter 84

“It’s coming,” said Monica Trant. “The Nail. We’ve seen it. Here it is.”

Mardina Jones didn’t want to believe what she was seeing in the slate Trant was holding, even as Trant, now in her seventies and still working, a deputy director of UEI’s kernel facility here at the Caloris base on Mercury, walked her through a diagrammatic reconstruction of orbits and trajectories.

Around them, as they tried to talk, everybody was evacuating the facility. There was panic everywhere in the dome, people running, their feet paddling at the ground in the one-third gravity, hauling personal luggage, boxes, precious slates loaded with a career’s work tucked into pouches at their belts. Many of them already had pressure suits on, ready to flee for the transports that were assembling to take them off, to escape from the blow to be struck by this “Nail”.

But Mardina didn’t want to go anywhere. Mardina was an ISF officer, or she had been before her two decades on Per Ardua, and now she was again, having taken up her duties once more on returning through the Hatch. Most recently she had been assigned to the top-secret technology offices here on Mercury to advise on renovations of hulk ship designs.

She was an ISF officer. She always had been, always would be, despite the ISF’s own betrayal. And ISF officers didn’t run from their duty. She dug deep inside for focus, for personal discipline. Her own safety wasn’t the issue just now, and hadn’t been for a long time. She wanted to stay right here, in the kernel facility’s main comms room, until she was assured that Beth was on board that big old hulk taking off from the moon, as Lex McGregor had promised her, and the hulk itself was on its way out of this damn inner-system war zone at last, and safe from the Nail. That was her duty now.

Trant was still talking.

Mardina looked at her. Trant, about her own age, looked just as scared as Mardina—more so, no doubt, since she understood what was going on so much better. “I’m sorry. Tell me again…”

The Nail: the ugly weapon that the Chinese had launched at Mercury.

“We knew the Chinese were cooking something up at Ceres. Our intelligence there even gave us a name—hence ‘the Nail’. Now it’s on the way. Look. These are deep-space images taken over three days ago. This is what the Chinese assembled at Ceres, after the abortive UN attempt to attack their base with ISF hulk ships…”

The assault had failed because of Chinese subterfuge. Long before the attack their special services had infiltrated the hulk crews. There was a brief firefight, hulk against hulk, a deep-space battle between huge ships capable of ferocious acceleration and carrying powerful missiles, an extraordinary spectacle in itself.

But it had been over in minutes, leaving a handful of survivor ships, all in Chinese hands. Ferries had come out from Ceres to take survivors off the wrecks. And meanwhile tugs had sailed out to drag the operational ships into a quickly improvised dry dock, just a big scaffolding frame in space, where they used the UN craft to build—something else.

“It’s fantastically crude,” Trant said. “You can see what they did, just lined up the hulks in a bank, side by side, coupled them with these struts here. Parallel burners. But each burner is a fully fledged interplanetary kernel-powered hulk ship.”

“And this is the Nail.”

“That’s right. We don’t know if it’s crewed or not. Probably it is; there wouldn’t have been time to automate the thing fully before it was fired off, just hours after the battle was concluded. A kamikaze mission, right? They evidently planned this, even before they boarded the ISF ships, they prepared for it, they had everything ready. Probably work continued on the combined craft even after launch out of Ceres, although that would have been difficult under the one-gravity thrust that prevailed.”

“One gravity?”

“Yes. And they’ve kept that up for more than three days. Look at this trajectory chart…” She tapped her slate.

It took Mardina a moment to understand what she was seeing: five concentric circles centred on a yellow disc, a straight line cutting across from the fifth circle out from the centre to the innermost.

“This is the solar system,” Monica Trant said. “Obviously. The paths of the planets, out to Ceres. Just schematic, but the markings show the planets’ current relative positions in their orbit. And this straight line—”

“The trajectory of the Nail.” Mardina was old enough to have been brought up on pre-kernel, pre-hulk spacecraft trajectories. Low-energy trajectories followed sections of ellipses, orbits like the planets’; you glided powerless along a curve from one world to the next, with a minor blip of a rocket engine at either end. A hulk ship, though, a craft that could accelerate at a whole gravity for days, weeks on end, crossed interplanetary space in straight lines. “You know, I worked in astronavigation. On a starship, for God’s sake. But we never drove a hulk ship across the solar system. We never made tracks like this.” Mardina counted the orbits. “And this is the Nail’s trajectory. From Ceres straight to Mercury.”

“Damn right.”

Mardina tried to remember her astronomical distances; Ceres was over two astronomical units out from the sun, more than twice as far as Earth, whereas Mercury was less than half an AU out. You had the relative positions in their orbits to take account of too. But after three days at constant one-G acceleration –

She looked at Trant, horrified. “It must be nearly here.”

“Only hours away. It’s been on a straight-line track for Mercury, indeed for this location on Mercury, this facility, since it was launched. The projections show it clearly. And it hasn’t deviated once.

“I think they’ve decided to take out the Caloris facility—the kernel-processing facilities, maybe even the Hatch. It’s kind of dog-in-the-manger; if we won’t share the kernel tech then nobody gets to use it. But there are precedents. In the past, states, or even organisations like the UN, have mandated strikes against rogue states to take out nuke facilities, for instance, before they had a chance to be used…”

Even faced with this blunt revelation, Mardina found it hard to take in. She’d heard hints of a threat to Mercury, the kernel plants, something coming this way. That had been enough for her to ship Beth as far out of the inner system as she could. But she’d imagined some kind of invasion, an attempt to take the Caloris base. She’d never imagined anything like this attempt at wilful destruction. “They’ve been in flight three days. They must have been seen by UN surveillance systems. Why has there been no warning to the staff?”

Trant pulled a face, weary, cynical. “This is a UEI facility. The UEI has a habit of secrecy. Anyhow, we thought it was a bluff. We thought they’d pull away, veer off after giving us a scare, having shown us what they can do. I guess they might still.”

“But you’ve decided not to bank on it. And that isn’t some damn V-2.” Again she tried to figure the numbers in her head. “After three days at a full G, they must be travelling at—”

“About one per cent the speed of light. And those hulk ships are pretty massive. That’s a lot of kinetic energy.”

“It’s a relativistic missile, is what it is. And they’ve unleashed it in the middle of the inner solar system? How could they even think of this?”

Monica Trant took her shoulders and stared in her face. “Mardina, the whole future of mankind pivots on this moment, these few hours and days. That’s how they can think of this. If they lose this game, they’ve lost for ever, because we’d have a monopoly on the kernels. Maybe we’d do the same, if the position was reversed. Probably would. You feel outrage? I feel outrage. Keep it for later. Meanwhile we have to get to one of the transports; they’re not going to wait.”

Something in Mardina broke at last. They started to run for the exit from the dome.

“I’m sorry,” she called to Trant. “I kept you behind.”

“Don’t sweat it. You were concerned for your girl. I’m a mother too. My son’s on Earth, in one of the new northern cities.”

“The Earth’s supposed to be protected—”

“That’s the theory.”

“Do you think he’ll be safe?”

Monica Trant shrugged as she ran, stiffly. “Rob’s a cop. They get weapons, the first pick of the available food, shelter. If he’s not safe down there nobody is.”

They reached a port in the dome wall, a surface tunnel leading to a transport craft out of here. But there was a crowd already here, a queue in the tunnel. Trant flashed a rank card to force their way through the line, but soon the people were jammed in so tight there was no way to get forward except to shuffle along with the herd.

People: they were all around Mardina, ISF crew and UEI personnel, scientists and administrators, mechanics and cooks and cleaners, the whole community that had sustained itself under this dome, all draining towards a handful of airlocks like this one, trying to escape. Children too, lanky low-gravity children born in a dome under the solar fire during their parents’ long-duration stays here on Mercury. Mardina had spent only a short time here since returning from Earth, but she was surprised how many she recognised. People: each one a fully rounded consciousness, each with a past, memories, hopes for the future, each with a mesh of family and friends and enemies, loves and loyalties, rivalries and hatreds. All jammed up arbitrarily in this tube like overflow baggage, with a relativistic missile coming down on their heads.

Trant murmured, “We’re using every which way to get out of here. If we make it out at all, we’ll be loaded onto a surface-to-surface bug. Even that has enough push to get us off the planet at least, for pick-up later. Any way to get people off the surface and scattered, we’re using. We’re even piling people into cargo pods and using the mass driver.”

Mardina, even as they worked their way through the crush, was still trying to figure out the implications of this assault. “The Nail is coming right down on top of the facility, right? Which itself sits on top of the densest concentration of kernels, and the Hatch structure itself.”

“That’s right.”

“So what’s the Nail going to do to the planet?”

Trant shrugged. “We don’t have good models. Partly because nobody took it seriously, despite the Chinese sending us endless warnings to evacuate. And since people have started taking it seriously, we’ve all been too busy running. At least a major impact; one of our experts thinks it will be like another Caloris. Which was a punch that created a crater that spanned one whole hemisphere, with a rebound at the antipode where waves in the surface rock converged. Which is why we want to get everybody off the planet altogether, if we can, even if it’s going to be a heck of a retrieval operation later.”

“But what about the kernels? I mean, energies like that—”

There was no time for Trant to reply. With a last shove, Mardina found herself at the head of a suddenly clearing queue. Two ISF officers, one male, one female, both uniformed, both armed, stood here, blocking the lock to the ship beyond. One grabbed Mardina’s arm and pulled her inside the ship, muttering a count, and then the other officer swung down his arm like a barrier. “That’s it, full to capacity.” He pressed a button. The officers held their place, arms linked, before the closing door. “No more room. Try another exit, or wait here for another craft…”

The excluded people seemed shocked, too bewildered to react to this abandonment. Among them was a child who screamed, yelled for his mother with arms outstretched, but he was held back by a young man, maybe his father.

And Mardina had left behind Monica Trant, on the wrong side of the ISF officers.

Mardina tried to get back to her. “Oh, hell, Monica, this is my fault, I slowed you down—”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be fine. Stay safe.” The lock door was already swinging closed, and Trant had to duck to maintain eye contact with Mardina. “And listen, if you get the chance, tell my son Rob that—”

The hatch clicked closed. The ISF officers, sweating, breathing hard, glanced at each other and backed away.

“Hell of a thing,” said the woman to the man.

“Too damn right.” The man turned and raised his voice to address the passengers. “Please find a couch. If you can’t find a couch, wedge yourself in somewhere, we are over capacity. We lift immediately.” He and his colleague made for the rear of the cabin, near the hatch to the corridor, and folded couches out of the wall.

Mardina, bereft, bewildered by the sudden transition from the crowded space to the interior of this craft, pushed her way in. She had ridden these bugs many times. They were just hoppers that took you from dome to dome, squirting their way over Mercury’s surface on feeble chemical-propellant rockets. You rode them at shift changes, at dome-morning or dome-night, when going to see a colleague, or travelling from a dormitory block to a workplace. Now the interior of the bus, with its curving walls and soothing beige colour scheme, had never seemed so small, so crowded was it with people, all scrambling to get to the few remaining couches. You weren’t meant to be fleeing for your life in a vessel like this.

Mardina found a place by the wall, next to a couch where a young woman cradled her baby, and sat on the carpeted floor with her feet jammed against a strut.

She had barely settled when the bug lifted with a lurch, much more roughly than she remembered from any early morning commute. People gasped or called out; a few who weren’t safely strapped into couches stumbled and fell to the floor. A baby started crying. And the lift went on and on, not like a commute hop, this was a single mighty leap which would, when the fuel was exhausted, fling them away from Mercury altogether—where they would drift in space until picked up, if they ever were.

Mardina wondered how long was left until the impact of the Nail.

And she thought about the kernels.

She knew that kernels were like tiny wormholes, leaking energy, that could be manipulated open and closed with lasers and magnetic fields. Had anybody done any modelling of what might become of the kernels, and the energy they channelled, when the Nail was driven into the Mercury ground? Presumably the Chinese couldn’t have; they were supposed to have no access to kernel physics anyhow. Maybe they thought this was just a surgical strike. Closing the lid of the UN’s treasure trove: nothing more destructive than that. But if not…

Mardina still had her slate, in its pouch at her waist. As the clumsy craft’s acceleration juddered on, as the passengers gradually quietened down, she dug out the slate, and looked up at the woman with the baby. “Excuse me. Can I use your comms link? The one on your couch…”

The woman shrugged, holding her baby’s head against her chest.

Mardina pulled down a small earpiece on a fibre-optic cable from the couch. She swiped it with her slate to give it her ID. The earpiece lit up, and she tucked it behind her ear. “I want to speak to my daughter. Beth Eden Jones.” She swiped another ID, to identify Beth. “I know she’s on a hulk ship heading towards the outer system. I’ll record a message. I want you to keep trying to make the call until you get a response, right?”

“Confirmed,” replied a soft synthetic voice.

So the solar system’s shared comms systems were still working, at least. She looked around, self-conscious. Nobody was paying any attention to her, but she ducked her head even so. “Hi, sweetheart, it’s your mother. You won’t believe where I am…”

There was a streak of brilliant light, beyond the cabin walls, quite soundless, like a meteor falling. People turned, distracted.

Still the bug ascended from Mercury, as smoothly as before.

“If I get a chance I’ll tell you all about it. But the main thing is, I’m sorry I had to throw you at General Lex, even if he does owe me a favour. Wherever you end up I’ll come looking for you. Don’t forget that I’ll always

Chapter 85

Monitors in space and elsewhere observed the event, reconstructed its consequences later, and reported their conclusions to survivors. Or attempted to.

The Nail hit the surface of Mercury, dead on target at the kernel-physics facility at Caloris, at one per cent of the speed of light.

It delivered the kinetic energy of an asteroid three hundred metres across moving at interplanetary speeds. An energy load equivalent to all of Earth’s nuclear arsenals at the most dangerous moment of the twentieth-century Cold War. An energy load equivalent to a month of the planet’s entire output, in the most profligate days of the twenty-first century. All of this energy was injected into the upper crust of Mercury, and the kernel beds beneath, in less than a millisecond.

The kernel facility, with a wide swathe of the crust, was utterly destroyed, rock vaporised to gas. The molten walls of a tremendous new crater rolled across this world’s battered surface.

But the Nail’s fall was only the trigger. In response to the tremendous shock, in layers deep beneath the surface, kernels yawned open, like the mouths of baby birds. And a pulse of energy of an intensity never before seen in the solar system was unleashed, carried by a flood of short-wavelength photons, X-rays and gamma rays that fled the site at the speed of light, and then by a wavefront of massive particles, moving somewhat more slowly, but highly energetic themselves.

After a fiftieth of a second the radiation pulse had passed through the body of Mercury. Across the face of the planet the rocky crust was liquefied, the human installations on the Mercury ground gone in a moment. Even the iron core roiled.

After another fiftieth of a second the photon wave overwhelmed the fleeing surface-hopper bug, and the rest of the armada of fragile refugee ships, rising from the surface. To Mardina it was as if a light went off inside her head, inside her very skull.

After eight minutes the photon shockwave reached Earth.

Chapter 86

Officer Rob Trant was on duty, cruising the east side of New Prudhoe, Alaska.

He was well aware of the date, and the time. This was when the Nail was due to strike Mercury, as his mother Monica had warned him. But despite having this inside channel he didn’t know much more about the international crisis than any other cop in the country.

They’d been briefed about fears of a backlash on Earth, whatever happened up in space: a rising by ethnic Chinese types in the cities, maybe, or some kind of revenge attacks taking place on them in turn. Whatever. Rob had seen nothing untoward so far, in the ruined suburbs he patrolled. But he knew the news of even the most dramatic events on Mercury would take long minutes to crawl out here at lightspeed.

Personally he didn’t think anything would come of it. The whole Chinese winter thing had been a kind of bluff, after all.

He knew his mother was in the centre of it, on Mercury he could never have persuaded her to come away. She had opened up to him more in recent days than for a long time, in fact more than since the moment he’d finally rebelled at his life under a dome on Mercury, and had cashed in his partially completed ISF training to become a cop on Earth. It was hard to have a decent conversation with the long minutes of light delay between the worlds. She’d promised him some kind of message today, a long missive. But the message hadn’t come, not yet.

He missed his mother. He admitted it, in lonely moments. He was forty-two years old, had come to Earth in his twenties, had always been too much of an alien to make close friends, to fall in love. He missed his mother’s company, but he didn’t feel concerned for her right now. He concentrated on his job.

New Prudhoe was a sprawling conurbation less than seventy years old, the historic plaques and markers you saw everywhere told you that, a product of the great northern migrations of the last century. It felt like it was a lot older to Trant, especially in the neighbourhoods he worked, which had once been prosperous middle-class suburbs, thriving on the post-Jolt prosperity of this Arctic ocean coast. But now the Chinese winter had come and it went on and on, and the stores were closing, and people were losing their jobs and heading south for the duration, leaving behind only various deadbeats who couldn’t move or wouldn’t, and those who preyed on them, and cops. And then some other types had started coming back, with their own novel vices: most recently, hothead kids who had got addicted to Asgard and other live-action games, but had got bored with the simulation, bored with dying every day, and now wanted the thrill of the real thing. Well, today Rob felt relatively safe, in his armoured cruiser with its powerful weaponry and super-smart, ever-alert AI. Besides, it wasn’t long since the National Guard’s last clear-out, after a set-to confrontation when whole districts had burned.

The Nail arrival time must have come and gone. He checked his watch, trying to remember how long the time lag was between Earth and Mercury just now.

That was why he was thinking about his mother, when it came.

The car had just turned down a long avenue, once the centrepiece of the new city in the post-Jolt recovery days, now with only a handful of cars, all automated, cruising its length. So, as it happened, he was looking south when the photon shockwave washed over Earth. Rob saw it as a wave of blinding light coming up from below the horizon, but soon filling the car, and his head.

And suddenly his eyes felt like they were burning out of his head, and his vision went from dazzling white to utter black. He threw his arm over his face, crying out. He fumbled for the slate mounted on the dash, to call this in, this nuclear attack, whatever. He had to call it in. His eyes were pits of agony. He felt warm inside, like he’d been stuffed inside a microwave cooker…

On the long, mostly empty highway, the cars cruised on quietly, calmly, in their straight lines, their onboard AIs taking over the controls from drivers who threshed and screamed, tearing at sightless eyes. Until the radiation began to fry their electronics, and they slewed aside.

This was only the beginning. The particle storm, travelling slower than light, would not arrive for another two hours.

Chapter 87

Earthshine’s bunker remained calm, the staff working at their monitors and slates, recording, analysing, as the bad news from the sky filled the screens. Sir Michael King, walking stiffly with the aid of his stick, went around the staff individually, to reassure them that they were free to take a break, to try to contact family on the surface if they needed to. Most of them stayed where they were, as if by keeping on working, sticking to the routine, they were somehow holding the greater horror at bay.

Now the screens showed a darkening, a thickening smog, cutting off the unbearable brilliance of the sky.

King stormed into Earthshine’s central sanctum. “So what now? We had the flash—what next?”

“Massive particles,” said Earthshine—or at least the semi-transparent partial copy the primary had left behind when he fled on the Tatania. “The ozone layer is already gone. Ultraviolet and gamma rays are battering the surface of the Earth. As for life, basic cellular functions are being compromised.” The virtual looked thoughtful. “People are being cooked. Animals too. And now the cosmic ray storm. The last surviving satellites, shielded by Earth’s shadow from the flash, told us that much. The high-energy particles will be knocking atmospheric molecules apart, oxygen, nitrogen, to produce nitrogen dioxide. Some of which will combine with rain to produce nitric acid, acid rain, while the rest lingers in the air to block out the sunlight which—”

“It’s an extinction event,” King breathed.

“Indeed. As if a gamma-ray burster had gone off in the heart of the solar system.”

“And the people?”

“The flash will have the most immediate effect. The radiation will kick in soon; cancers will take most of the survivors of the short-term cull.”

“Cull? What the hell kind of a word is that? And you, you bastards? You Core AIs?”

“Oh, we will survive in our deep shelters. I certainly in my central bunker, with this store as a primary backup, and the partial I sent offworld with Penny Kalinski as a secondary.”

“And then what?”

Earthshine shrugged. “A new domain of life will eventually populate the Earth. Perhaps we will have some influence on the future. Not myself, of course. I have fled…”

“I feel like hurting you.”

“It’s not my fault. We tried to broker peace through the Council of Worlds. Yet I understand how you feel.”

“Then whose fault is it? Ours, the Chinese?”

“Maybe neither. Some reports have emerged about the beginnings of this, at Mars, at Ceres. Although I doubt if any historians will survive to piece together a full account. I am uploading what I can to my partial twins in the deep store and on the Tatania…”

“Some bastard pulled the trigger, right? That’s what it boils down to. Without waiting the few minutes it would have taken to get confirmation from Earth. Christ. That was always the fear in the first Cold War, you know. That a commander of some nuclear sub, out of touch with his government, would take matters into his own hands.”

“But even now the events that followed are uncertain. There have been fragmentary reports of mutinies on the Nail itself, by captive UN crew, and counter-mutinies by the Chinese, even as it fell towards Mercury. There may have been no control, in the end; as it came plummeting in for the strike the Nail was a war zone itself. There was nobody in a position to deflect it, even if the order had come to do so. How appropriate, that the end should come this way. A war nobody wanted, and thought would be kept at bay by sentimentality. A war triggered, not by any single command, but by foolishness, arrogance, and poor communication.”

He spoke blandly, not judgementally, King thought; lacking processing power, lacking definition, he was smooth-faced, static, unconvincing.

Suddenly King realised he was alone in here. Quite alone. Talking to nobody. He headed for the door. “Christ, I need a drink.”

Chapter 88

By the time the Nail struck Mercury the Tatania had already been travelling for three days. She had headed straight out from the Earth-moon system, away from the sun, and was more than three times as far from the sun as the Earth, when Beth picked up a fragmentary message from her mother.

“I’m sorry I had to throw you at General Lex, even if he does owe me a favour. Wherever you end up I’ll come looking for you. Don’t forget that I’ll always—”

And then, immediately after, the flash, dazzling bright, from the heart of the solar system. The bridge was flooded with light.

Beth saw them react. Lex McGregor, in his captain’s chair, straightening his already erect back. Penny Kalinski grabbing Jiang’s hands in both her own. Earthshine, the creepy virtual persona, seeming to freeze. They all seemed to know what had happened, the significance of the flash.

All save Beth.

“What?” Beth snapped. “What is it? What happened?”

Earthshine turned his weird artificial face to her. In the years she’d spent in the solar system Beth had never got used to sharing her world with fake people. “They have unleashed the wolf of war. We, humanity, we had it bound up with treaties, with words. No more. And now, this.”

“They being…”

“The Hatch builders. Who else?”

“And you, you aren’t human. You say we. You have no right to say that.”

The virtual looked at her mournfully. “I was human once. My name was Robert Braemann.”

And she stared at him, shocked to the core by the name.

Lex McGregor turned to face Penny. “So this is the kernels going up. Right, Kalinski?”

“I think so.”

“What must we do? We were far enough from the flash for it to have done us no immediate harm, I think. God bless inverse-square spreading. What comes next?”

Penny seemed to think it over. “There’ll probably be a particle storm. Like high-energy cosmic rays. Concentrated little packets of energy, but moving slower than light. They’ll be here in a few hours. Hard to estimate.”

“OK. Maybe I should cut the drive for a while, turn the ship around so we have the interstellar-medium shields between us and Mercury?”

“Might be a good idea.”

Beth didn’t understand any of this. “And what of Earth? What’s become of Earth?”

Penny looked back at her. “Life will recover, ultimately. But for now…”

Beth imagined a burned land, a black, lifeless ocean.

McGregor began the procedure to shut down the main drive and turn the ship around. His voice was calm and competent as he worked through his checklists with his crew.

Chapter 89 2217

On the day side of Per Ardua, the stars were invisible, save for Proxima itself, and the glorious twin primary suns of Alpha Centauri. But those who had followed Yuri and Liu and Stef in the exploration of the dark side, in the years following their pioneering trek, had rediscovered the night sky. A whole new generation had to be taught the constellations.

A distance of four light years wasn’t much on the scale of the volume of space that contained the thousands of stars visible to the human eye; the sky of Per Ardua’s endless night was pretty much like that seen from Earth, and save for the brilliance of the nearby Alpha stars the constellations were mostly very similar. Just as on Earth, Cassiopeia was a particular favourite, its W-shape easy to pick out. But as seen from Per Ardua, there was the addition of one dim star to that constellation. That pendant to the W was Sol, the nearest star to Proxima save for the Alphas, a grain of light that had been the site of all human history before the first missions to Proxima. Parents pointed this out to their children.

A little more than four years after the war, Sol flared so brightly that it was, briefly, visible even from the day side of Per Ardua.

Chapter 90

Stef looked at Yuri. “A gravity shift. Just like the Hatches on Mercury and Per Ardua. So we’re already there. Wherever there is. And in the outside universe more time has passed. Years, maybe, or—”

“Or centuries.” Yuri grinned. “Shall we?”

There was no ladder in the final chamber, but the closed lid above bore a hand-imprint key. Yuri boosted Stef up on his shoulders so she could work the key. As she fumbled, he grunted. “Get on with it, woman.”

“Look at us. Two old idiots, exploring interstellar space.”

“But we’re here.”

“That we are.”

At last the lid swung back. There was a faint pop of equalising pressure. They found themselves looking up at a blue, apparently harmless sky—and the air that rushed in, full of odd smells, was maybe a bit thin and cold, but healthy, oxygen-rich air, undoubtedly. Yuri deliberately kept breathing. They had no stored oxygen; there was no point holding their breath. But he felt no ill effects.

Stef clambered out of the pit, then reached down to help Yuri scramble up. Once again they had some trouble. It was a comedy, Yuri thought, two old stiffs climbing out of a hole in the ground. At last he was out, and they looked at each other, laughed.

Then they stood together and faced a new world.

They were on high ground here, which sloped away to a plain streaked with purple and white, on which stood a scatter of slim orange cones, vegetation perhaps. To the right the ground rose up to a rocky massif—no, it was too regular to be natural, Yuri realised slowly. It was some kind of tremendous building, a sloping face with deep grooved inlets. On the horizon he saw more mountains, mist-shrouded, that again looked suspiciously regular, like tremendous pyramids.

A sun dominated the sky, huge, hanging low, its face pocked with dark spots.

“Wow,” said Stef simply.

Yuri dug out his elderly ISF-issue slate, which had a wireless link to the ColU’s processor box, in his chest pack. “Can you see all this, old buddy?”

A single green light sparked on the slate.

“So, any idea where we are?”

“None at all,” Stef said. She pointed at the main sun. “That looks like another Proxima, another M dwarf. But the Galaxy is full of M dwarfs. We could be anywhere…”

A huge shadow swept over the ground to their left. Yuri looked up.

“I guess we should start walking,” Stef said, still staring ahead. She hadn’t noticed the shadow, evidently. “If we manage to see any stars we might reconstruct a constellation pattern, figure out where we are. I have the 3D positions of the nearby stars loaded on my slate.”

“Or,” Yuri said, “we could just ask.” He pointed upwards.

At last she turned to see.

Over their heads, a craft was descending, coming in to land.

It was like a tremendous airship. It moved smoothly, silently. It bore a symbol on its outer envelope, crossed axes with a Christian cross in the background, and lettering above:

Anchors of some kind were dropped from a fancy-looking gondola. When the craft had drifted to a halt a rope ladder unrolled to the ground. And as they watched, astonished, a hatch opened, and a man clambered down the ladder.

As soon as he reached the ground the man started towards them. He wore a plumed helmet, and a scarlet cloak over what looked like a bearskin tunic. His lower legs were bare, above strapped-up boots. He had a sword on one hip, and a gaudy-looking handgun in a holster on the other.

Yuri called, “Who the hell are you?”

The man, striding steadily, started shouting back: “Fortasse accipio oratio stridens vestri. Sum Quintus Fabius, centurio navis stellae ‘Malleus Jesu’. Quid estis, quid agitis in hac provincia? Et quid est mixti lingua vestri? Germanicus est? Non dubito quin vos ex Germaniae Exteriorae. Cognovi de genus vestri prius. Bene? Quam respondebitis mihi?

Always another door, Yuri thought. “Let me handle this.” He spread his hands and walked forward, towards the angry stranger.

In the hearts of a hundred billion worlds –

Across a trillion dying realities in a lethal multiverse –

In the chthonic silence –

There was satisfaction. The network of mind continued to push out in space, from the older stars, the burned-out worlds, to the young, out across the Galaxy. Pushed deep in time too, twisting the fate of countless trillions of lives.

But time was short, and ever shorter.

In the Dream of the End Time, there was a note of urgency.