Delga laughed at him. ‘Remember me, Tollemache? You owe me money.’
‘Fuck off. Which of you bastards is the sick bastard?’
Mardina glared. ‘Which do you think?’
Tollemache stomped over to the ColU, glanced over Mattock, and placed his spare coat over him. ‘Get that drip out of his arm. We’ll get him into the truck and back to the base.’
They got organised. There was a stretcher in the rover, quickly unfolded, and under Tollemache’s brusque directions they prepared to lift Mattock into the rover’s interior. The migrants had to do it themselves; Tollemache stood by, and nobody else came out of the rover to give a hand.
The rover’s interior was brightly lit and smelled of disinfectant. Yuri could see there was a driver in a sealed cabin upfront, beyond a thick window. Beth looked around the vehicle in wide-eyed wonderment. Mardina’s look was more complex. Resentful, perhaps. Anger building. Struggling with the Peacekeeper’s heavy body in this clean technological space, Yuri felt grimy, out of place.
‘I don’t get putting a coat on top of him,’ Liu admitted. ‘Won’t that just make him hotter?’
‘I’ve seen this design before,’ Mardina said. ‘Tollemache’s wearing the same. There’s frozen ice in there, inside insulated layers.’
‘And built-in cryo circuits,’ Tollemache said. ‘They left us ready for the heat here. They gave us the right kind of diet to cope, extra vitamin C, low calories, low protein, high carbs . . . They monitor us, I mean the autodocs, they take our temperatures all the time.’
‘With a probe up your ass,’ Delga said. ‘I do hope they stuck a probe permanently up your ass.’
Tollemache ignored her. ‘Anyway it’s been easy since this star winter, as you call it, cut in. Not like before.’
Yuri said, ‘ “As we call it.” You hear everything we say, do you?’
‘The AIs listen in, and filter. Don’t flatter yourself, shithead. You’re not that important.’
‘I knew it,’ Mardina said, her voice thickening with anger. ‘I knew it, all these years. I told you, Yuri.’
‘Yeah. But they never came out of their box to help you, did they?’
Tollemache pointed. ‘Get him strapped down on that couch. There won’t be room for you all to ride. Two of you, with him. The rest will walk with me. If you can keep up.’
Mardina and Beth got into the back of the rover. The door flaps closed up seamlessly, and the rover rolled back, did a brisk turn, and pushed away into the forest.
Tollemache faced them, Yuri, Delga, Liu. He pointed the way the rover had gone. ‘Follow the rover. I’ll follow you. I don’t trust any of you.’
Delga just laughed at him. She walked away with Liu.
Yuri said, ‘Our ColU—’
‘It can follow us. And the one you wrecked.’
‘It wasn’t us – ah, the hell with it.’
As they walked, Yuri was soon immersed once more in enclosing, withering heat, and he hoped it really wasn’t far to this base of Tollemache’s. Tollemache himself walked boldly enough, but Yuri wondered how much good his ice-laden suit and all the rest actually did him.
There was a clattering noise behind them. Tollemache whirled, drawing his gun. ‘Fucking woodies.’
‘What? You mean builders. We call them builders.’
‘I know you do, and I don’t care. Annoying little bastards. Not even much use for target practice.’ But he raised his gun anyhow.
So this was how the builders had been excluded from their forest. ‘Leave them alone,’ Yuri said, suddenly angry. ‘They’ve more right to be here than you have, Peacekeeper.’
Tollemache grunted, but moved on.
‘So,’ Delga called back. ‘The Ad Astra’s long gone, and you’re still here, Tollemache.’
‘Not all of it.’
‘What?’
‘Not all the Ad Astra left. You’ll see. They split the ship, dropped one of the hulls here, at the substellar.’
And Yuri remembered sighting the ship in his telescope, when it was still in orbit, with just a single hull.
‘Turned it into a long-term hab. They weren’t going to let you shitters run around killing yourselves without some monitoring, were they? Although all we ever do is keep score. It’s not so bad. We got a five-hundred-year nuke power plant, hot water, downloads from Earth, everything. They asked for volunteers to man it.’
Delga laughed. ‘You actually volunteered, you dumb schmuck.’
Tollemache was not a man to hide his anger. ‘You keep that up and I’ll stitch you a new tattoo before we get to the base.’
‘But you volunteered,’ she persisted.
‘Five years. That was the deal. They were building another ship, going to send it out. They’d cycle us back to Earth after five years. They were offering a hell of a bonus.’
‘But they never came back,’ Delga said.
‘Incredible,’ Yuri mused. ‘They told us it would be a century before another call. What they told us was more true than what they told you.’
Delga laughed again. ‘What’s it like in there after twenty years, Tollemache? Worn out the pause button on your porn machine yet?’
‘Fuck off, lizard lady – hey! What the hell?’
There was a blur of motion to their left, a clattering like chopsticks.
‘It was the builders,’ the ColU said calmly. ‘They were following us, at a distance. And now—’
‘They just took off,’ Liu said.
‘Where to?’
‘How should I know?’
‘They seemed keen to find something, deep in this forest,’ the ColU said. ‘A forest from which they have been excluded for some time, remember.’
Yuri eyed Liu.
‘Let’s go and see,’ Liu said.
‘Hell, yes. Come on, before we lose them!’
They both ducked off the trail and into the deeper forest.
‘Hey!’ Tollemache yelled. ‘Get back here, you little shits!’
Yuri heard Delga cackling.
Ahead, Yuri could just see a builder, skittering and whirling. He lunged on, but quickly lost sight of his prey. ‘Liu – which way now?’
‘Right, I think. I just saw – yeah! There. Come on!’
They plunged into the forest, crashing through ever denser foliage, moving as fast as they could, trying not to lose sight of the fleeing builders, outpacing the ColU. But Yuri quickly tired in the smothering heat. There was no sense of direction in this dense, clinging forest, no shadows cast from the clouded-over sky – and the overhead sun would have been no use for wayfinding anyhow. Yuri was soon turned around, with no idea which way they had come, where they had got to.
Then they came to a clearing.
They stood inside the last rank of trees, breathing hard. This open space, maybe twenty paces across, was a rough circle. No trees grew here, but there was a thick bed of stems over a patch of swampy ground.
And the builders were here, the nine who had travelled in with them from the lake to the north. They whirled and clattered and skimmed across the muddy ground, dragging away stems as they went. Every so often two or three would encounter each other, and they would share their peculiar dance-like communications.
‘We need the ColU,’ Liu said, breathless. ‘I wonder what the hell they’re talking about.’
‘I don’t know. But they’re clearing those stems pretty quickly.’
It seemed only minutes before a patch of ground, a rough square maybe ten metres across, had been cleared. Now some of the builders worked their way through the exposed mud, whirring around like propeller blades. Others were hastily digging out a kind of trench, leading away from the central area, through which water was soon trickling.
‘Look at that,’ Liu said. ‘They’re draining this bit of swamp.’
‘Yeah. And digging up the mud. See how hard they’re working. Like they’re desperate to do this. This is what they’ve been excluded from, I guess. Come on, we’ll help. Let’s
get filthy.’ Yuri got down on his hands and knees in the clinging mud, and began to haul at the heavy stuff, picking up handfuls and hurling it away.
Liu grunted, then got down warily. ‘OK. But when my heart gives out, go get Nurse Tollemache . . .’
The two men made little impact on the mud layer compared to the remarkably efficient spinning of the builders. Nevertheless Yuri soon got down a metre or more in the patch he was digging.
And then he found a hard surface, under the mud. Shocked, he pulled back.
He dug in again, clearing a space. That deep surface was hard, flat – and cold, certainly colder than the mud that overlay it, colder than the air in the forest clearing. Growing excited now, he hauled at the mud in great armfuls, until he had exposed a stretch of some kind of floor, perfectly flat, grey, hard to the touch.
Liu was staring. ‘I found the same. What the hell is it? Some kind of metal?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘An artefact? Human, or . . .’
Yuri just shrugged. He was beyond questions.
‘How come Tollemache doesn’t know about this? If they’d found it you’d think they’d have it dug out by now.’ He laughed. ‘Or stuck it on a plinth in the UN Plaza.’
‘Tollemache doesn’t know because he never looked. They must have chased away the builders rather than watch what they were up to.’
He thought he saw a seam now, a fine line in the surface, so fine it was almost invisible. He traced it with his thumb. He dug out the mud, working backwards on his knees, exposing more seam. It seemed to be curving inward, gradually. He dug and dug, following the seam.
Until Liu tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Time to take a step back, buddy.’
Yuri stood, covered in mud, panting, sweating. He’d forgotten how hot he was.
And he saw that while he’d dug his clumsy trench the builders had cleared the rest of the area. They had exposed a metallic floor, still mud-streaked but gleaming in the grey light of the clouds. There were shapes cut into the upper surface, like three-pointed starbursts a metre or so across – clusters of three at a time, all the way across the floor.
‘There’s your seam,’ Liu said, pointing.
It was a perfect circle maybe three metres across, cut into the grey floor. It seemed obvious what this was. Set in the ground of this alien world, known only to the builders, it was –
‘A hatch,’ Yuri said. ‘We found a hatch.’
CHAPTER 55
When Yuri, Liu and Tollemache finally got to the Peacekeepers’ encampment after their diversion to the builders’ hatch, they found the Ad Astra hull lying on its side in the substellar forest. After more than two decades mature trees crowded around the hull, obscuring it, so that coming upon it was like discovering the relic of some lost civilisation. Huge cargo-bay doors were raised at the rear end of the hull, exposing garages, workshops, stores; tarpaulins hung over the doors to keep out the rain, lashed down against the wind.
By the time Yuri and the others arrived, the driver had backed his rover into a bay in the belly of the hull. The ColU was parked up too. Yuri saw its camera eyes fixed on him with a longing to know what they had found. ‘Later, buddy,’ he murmured.
A people-sized door was opened in the hull’s flank, with a short set of steps lowered to the ground. Waved forward by Tollemache, Yuri and Liu climbed the steps.
Yuri paused by the door frame. The hull’s skin was covered by a layer of anti-impact cladding that still bore UN and ISF logos, and warning signs about fuel loading and electrics. The cladding itself was yellowed and had suffered a multitude of little holes, like insect boring. This was a human-made thing that had travelled between the stars. And now here it was, buried in the jungle of an alien world. Sometimes Yuri really did feel like a man out of his time.
And Mardina and Beth came hurrying along a short corridor to the doorway to meet them, Beth wide-eyed and grinning. ‘Wow, Dad! Look what we found!’
‘Wait until I tell you what we found . . .’
But Tollemache was waiting behind them. ‘Move it, shithead.’
Yuri just laughed. Tollemache had got noticeably more irritable since Yuri and Liu had found him on the way back, and told him all about the hatch – a spectacular discovery within walking distance, that might even have been his ticket off the planet, years ago, that he’d entirely missed. No wonder he was sore. Yuri moved on, following Liu and the others through the door.
Inside, the hull was brightly lit by fluorescents, a soulless glow that Yuri remembered too well from the years of his interstellar flight. And, when they got the door shut, it quickly turned cool, cool enough that Beth was soon shivering.
They were led to a kind of central hall where a table was set with three chairs. An older man in an ISF uniform was hastily dragging in more stackable chairs from a store. ‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘My name’s Brady; the rank’s lieutenant.’
‘Same as mine,’ Mardina said.
‘I know, Lieutenant Jones. I remember you. My promotion is more recent.’
Mardina glanced at Yuri and raised her eyebrows. More recent?
The rover driver walked in through another door. It was the first time Yuri had seen the man without a pane of glass standing between them.
‘And this is Major Keller,’ Brady said. ‘Jay Keller. Another recent promotion.’
Keller was about fifty, Brady maybe sixty, Yuri thought. Their uniforms were spruce enough.
They all stood around, uncertain. This big chamber inside the hull was like a brightly lit hall, with its curving ceiling overhead, spotlessly clean. It had evidently been refitted since its years in space. Mesh partition panels had been repositioned to give a flat floor with storage space beneath. Yuri could see bunks in screened-off areas, what looked like a galley, a comms console, maybe a science bay. A huge black screen dominated one whole area, with sofas drawn up before it. The fans and pumps of the air conditioning hummed, busy. They were inside a vast, shiny machine, just as if they were in space again.
In this setting the six travellers, covered in mud and wearing clothes made of bark, looked like chunks of the jungle. Beth was staring around, the fluorescents reflected in her eyes.
And Keller and Brady were staring at her, in her skimpy jungle-heat clothing.
‘My daughter,’ said Yuri.
‘And mine,’ Mardina said heavily.
Keller and Brady glanced at each other, looked away.
Beth seemed oblivious to this. ‘I thought that truck was something. But this . . .’
Mardina hugged her. ‘Welcome to my world, sugar.’
Brady moved, breaking the tension. ‘Please. Sit. You can imagine we don’t get too many guests.’
Tollemache grunted. ‘These fuckers aren’t guests.’ He shucked off his ice-filled coat and pulled opened his uniform jacket. His corpulent face bore a ragged layer of grey-white stubble. ‘They’re illegals, remember. They were supposed to stay where we put ’em. They shouldn’t be here at all.’
Brady smiled. ‘Yeah, well, Parry, Sanchez, Britten and Sen should have stayed put too, and they’re long gone. Come on, Tollemache. After all this time we’re all just human beings together on an alien world, right?’
Tollemache just shook his head, walking away. ‘Christ, I need a shit.’
‘Sit, please,’ Brady said again. ‘You’d like something to drink? We have orange juice—’
He got no further than that. ‘Orange juice?’ said Liu. ‘You have orange juice?’
Keller and Brady hastily laid on a kind of breakfast, of oats with milk, something convincingly like bacon, toast, orange juice, and coffee.
Mardina fell on the coffee, drinking cup after cup. ‘I never knew falling off the wagon could feel so good.’
Liu ate until, he said, his gut ached. Beth just nibbled; the food seemed to be too rich for her.
‘I’m guessing this stuff doesn’t come out of an iron cow,’ Liu said.
‘Oh, we have all that,’ Keller said. ‘But w
e were left with a mass of supplies, and the recycling still works pretty well. The system was meant to support eight; even now there’s more than enough for three.’
Mardina frowned. ‘Eight?’
‘Four men, four women,’ Tollemache said, emerging from a bathroom, zipping his fly. ‘The women left in year seven.’
‘Can’t imagine why,’ Mardina murmured, looking away from him.
‘Just drove off into the fucking jungle in one of the rovers. Never heard from them again. Probably long dead, all of them. That left four of us.’
‘Cancer got Whitstable,’ Keller said. ‘Maybe you remember him, Lieutenant?’
Mardina shrugged.
Delga grinned. ‘I heard from your buddy here that you volunteered for this, right? You actually trusted ISF to come back for you.’
‘There was going to be a bonus,’ Brady said. ‘Promotions.’
‘Well, at least you got those, it sounds like,’ Liu said, laughing now. ‘What, did the chief of the ISF itself call you up from four light years away?’
‘And all the time,’ Mardina said, ‘you were surveilling us. The colonists.’
‘Well, we tried. You would keep moving around, all of you . . .’
Mardina said, ‘We were told we were on our own here, on Per Ardua.’
Tollemache said stonily, ‘The planet’s called Prox c.’
‘We were told there was no ISF presence. We were told there would be no resupply, no visit, not for a century.’
‘Well, they would tell you that,’ Brady said. ‘To get you to perform the way they wanted you to perform. Making babies, and filling Prox c with little UN citizens before the Chinese get here.’
‘Yeah,’ Mardina said bitterly. ‘Just like they told you what you wanted to hear. To get you to perform.’
Brady stiffened. ‘I think we’ve maintained our morale pretty well in the circumstances.’
‘We make our reports,’ Keller said. ‘Monthly, more often if something comes up. The science guys back on Earth are interested in the variable star winter going on just now.’
‘And we get responses,’ Brady said. ‘I mean, there’s a four-year each-way light delay, but we do get responses.’
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