The astronaut shook her head, irritated, baffled. ‘What are you talking about? What planet?’
‘Prox c.’
The astronaut stared at him. ‘Conan Tollemache!’
‘What?’
‘I knew I recognised you. Your face has been all over the news just recently. Peacekeeper Tollemache, right?’
‘What’s it to you?’
The astronaut turned to the others, one by one. ‘Mardina Jones. Yuri Eden. Beth Eden Jones. All four of you. My God.’
Mardina glared at her, confused, disturbed. ‘What is this? What do you mean, the four of us? How do you know our names?’
‘You’re the four who disappeared, into the hatch on Prox c, a few hours ago.’ She frowned. ‘No. That is, given the time it took for the news to get here at lightspeed – four years ago, I’m guessing, by your time . . .’
They spoke at once.
‘We didn’t disappear anywhere,’ Mardina said.
‘What do you mean, we disappeared on Prox c?’ Yuri asked. ‘Where are we now, if not on Prox c?’
‘Who are you?’ Beth asked.
But Tollemache was the most insistent. He faced the young astronaut. ‘Four years ago. Bullshit.’ He raised his ISF-issue chronometer, and brought up the date. ‘This is the date. 2193.’
‘No.’ Backing away from Tollemache, the woman bent to pick up her slate, and brought up a date of her own. ‘This is the date. 2197.’
Yuri could see it. If this astronaut wasn’t lying to them – and why the hell would she? – he had just jumped forward four years and a couple of months in time. Just like the cryo sleep.
‘Not again,’ he said.
The astronaut looked at him strangely. Then she smiled, competent, efficient, taking control, her training kicking in. ‘To answer your questions. Sir, my name is Stephanie Kalinski, Colonel, ISF. Good to meet you. And as to where you are, Ms Eden Jones,’ she said to Beth, ‘welcome to the solar system. You’re on Mercury.’
CHAPTER 61
Penny tried to make sense of the news from Mercury. Refugees from another star, wandering out of the Hatch in the kernel layers? What could it possibly mean?
King growled, ‘Damn it. That cuckoo’s nest at the heart of the solar system is screwing us up again. And I’ve got to go back to Mercury to sort the bloody mess out.’ He got up and left the room, without ceremony.
Penny, hastening to follow him, gathered up her stuff. The room was suddenly full of muttered conversation, hostile glares between renewed rivals. Penny had no diplomatic antennae to speak of, but the change in mood was obvious. She remembered Earthshine’s deep suspicion of the Hatch and the kernels and whoever was behind those mysteries on Mercury, and their malevolent effect on human affairs. Now here was another intervention of the same kind: another bizarre miracle on Mercury, perhaps, another gift from some unknown benefactor from which the Chinese were once more excluded.
She wondered what the hell had really happened on Mercury. And how come her sister was involved, as evidenced by the glares directed at her.
She looked for Jiang, seeking a way out of here.
CHAPTER 62
The astronaut, Colonel Stef Kalinski, shepherded the newly arrived Arduans out of the pit from the stars.
One by one they climbed the short fixed ladder. Yuri went first; it was easy in the low gravity. Once out of the pit Yuri looked back and saw an open cover, tipped up, just like the one he’d seen on Per Ardua. Remarkably, on the outside face of the lid there were not builder body-plan grooves, but indents to take human hands. And now he recalled the builders who had been their guides, so to speak, through the hatch from Per Ardua. He glanced down into the pit, past his companions, but the builders were nowhere to be seen; maybe they’d taken the chance to run back home, and he couldn’t blame them for that.
As soon as they were out Kalinski shepherded them through this rocky cavern to an elevator. It was a smooth but fast ride upwards. Kalinski, smiling, told them they were rising up through hundreds of kilometres. Yuri neither believed nor disbelieved that; he couldn’t take it in.
When they emerged from the elevator Yuri looked around, increasingly bewildered, trying to get his bearings. He found himself under a dome. Clear ceiling panels admitted the ferocious light of a sun above, which looked at least twice the size it had from Earth – not as big as the apparent size of Proxima from Per Ardua, but much, much brighter, even as seen through the evidently heavily filtered dome panels. He saw open doorways leading to transparent tunnels, no doubt connecting this dome to others on the surface. He knew the logic of this; it was just as he’d got used to on Mars, sealed up in the domes of Eden.
The dome itself was cluttered with white-box science and computing gear, and what looked like atmospheric control equipment of the kind he remembered from Mars. The interior seemed brilliantly clean to Yuri, even sterile, like a hospital. There was no need for artificial light under that huge lowering sun, but floods stood on tripods around the pit, into which cameras peered, presumably day and night. Colonel Kalinski, in her black-as-night astronaut uniform, was the only person here – her, and the four arrivals from Proxima Centauri.
Beth quailed from the brilliant sunlight overhead. And she threw up, suddenly, spewing the rich food she’d eaten in the substellar base half-digested onto the clean floor of the dome. Some kind of servo-robot, a more advanced model than Yuri had seen before, came scuttling out to scoop up the mess with quick vacuum sucks.
‘I’m sorry,’ Beth said, sounding distressed. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
‘That’s OK,’ Kalinski said. ‘Do you need to clean up? We can give you fresh clothes from the stores, of course . . .’ She hesitated, listening to a comms unit at her ear. ‘My administrators are scrambling to put together some kind of response to this situation. For a start I’m to drive you over to the hab domes. I’m sorry to be disorganised, we’re not prepared for this, as you can imagine.’ Her accent sounded vaguely American, Yuri thought, but with a twang he couldn’t quite place.
Mardina said, ‘This must be strange for you too.’
‘Kind of. But the Hatch is the reason I’m here, on Mercury. I’m a theoretical physicist. Since the Hatch was uncovered, I’ve seen a lot of strangeness. Believe me, you four walking through from Proxima doesn’t even top the list.’ She grinned, somewhat ruefully, Yuri thought. ‘But I’m sure glad I was here to see this, to see you arrive. Once I saw the images of your Hatch on Prox c, matching the one here on Mercury, I knew it had to be something like this.’
Yuri frowned. ‘Like what?’
‘A lightspeed transit system. Like a subway. I mean, you got here at lightspeed, nearly, we established that already. A four-year transit time. With no subjective time lag at all – am I right?’
‘A lightspeed subway?’ Yuri asked. ‘Built by who? And why?’
Beth said now, ‘And I show up in the middle of this cosmic wonder and throw up all over it.’
Kalinski laughed and took Beth’s hand. ‘Don’t worry about it. Somehow it seems appropriate . . . You know, Beth Eden Jones, you’re the first human born on Proxima c to have returned to Earth. Think of that.’
Mardina grunted. ‘She’ll be famous.’
‘For better or worse, I think that’s true.’
Tollemache seemed to like the idea of that. ‘Famous, eh?’
‘Oh, yes. The images you sent back of the Hatch twin on Proxima c have been a sensation.’
Tollemache hefted his sensor pack. ‘Images taken with this very pack. Look, I need to speak to people.’ He thought it over. ‘My superior officers. Hell, an agent—’
Kalinski held up her hand, and pulled her chiming slate from her belt. ‘I’m sorry, sir, we’ll have to talk later. I’ll escort you to the rover, and then to Dome Z where we’ll all go through decon.’
Mardina raised her eyebrows. ‘Decontamination?’
‘Well, yes. This whole dome is a secure environment. It has been since the Hatc
h was discovered. We’re dealing with an alien artefact here – or at least that’s the best guess we have – with unknown properties. Every time I come out of here, or my twin—’
Beth looked interested. ‘Twin?’
‘Long story. I have to go through decon too. And now you’re here, and who knows what little passengers you’ll have brought back from Proxima c with you? Then, I’m afraid, you’re going to face a barrage of questions, tests, by doctors, physicists . . . Look, we’re making this up as we go along. You may be facing days of processing. I’m sorry.’
Tollemache grinned. ‘The price of fame. God, I’m looking forward to seeing Earth again.’
At least Yuri could tell what he was thinking. Mardina’s look was complicated, calculating; Yuri had no real idea what she had made of this strange turn of events.
And Beth, who had been born under the light of a distant star, who had grown up surrounded by an alien intelligence, who had walked fearlessly into an alien pit on Per Ardua, looked frankly terrified.
CHAPTER 63
Kalinski led them through an airlock directly into a rover, more or less of the kind Yuri was used to from Mars. Once they were all strapped in, Kalinski sat in the left-hand driver’s seat and murmured instructions to an onboard AI.
The rover pulled away from the dome and rolled off. As they did so Yuri glimpsed another rover heading back to the Hatch dome, faces peering through the windows. More scientists on the way in case of more arrivals, perhaps. And Peacekeepers, probably. That would be a characteristic response.
The ride was bumpy, on a road roughly cut through rocky terrain. The windows were very small and looked downward, so you could never see the horizon, let alone the sky with that huge baleful sun. But the light gleamed back painfully from exposed rock faces and the few human artefacts, way marks, signs, small science set-ups.
Kalinski turned to face her passengers. ‘I like to drive myself, generally. But I thought I’d better not take a chance with such a precious cargo.’
‘Thanks,’ Mardina said with a sneer.
‘Oh, come on, Mom,’ Beth said. ‘Colonel Kalinski’s being very kind to us.’ She seemed to be over her partial-gravity nausea, and was looking around more brightly. ‘I can’t see much out of these funny little windows. Is that because of the sun?’
Kalinski said, ‘Yes . . . Do you know much about Mercury, Beth?’
‘Does the sun stay in one place in the sky, like Per Ardua?’
Kalinski took the name on board. ‘Per Ardua. That’s Prox c. OK. No, Mercury has a day that’s two-thirds of its year. It’s to do with tidal resonances. As a result the sun kind of wanders around the sky, as seen from the ground, going west, then east. The whole pattern repeats every two Mercury years. Which is a hundred and seventy-six Earth days.’
Tollemache said, ‘From what I saw the sun is pretty high just here.’
‘That’s right. We’re close to the equator, and it’s local noon – or midsummer. The biggest UN base is at the north pole, on the Boreas Planitia, where there are permanent shadows, ice. This is the Caloris basin. A giant impact crater. Which is why the ground is a broken-up jumble. It’s a difficult place to operate, and we wouldn’t have any kind of permanent base here at all, I guess, if it wasn’t for the kernel beds, and the Hatch being found here. It’s posed all kinds of technical challenges, working here.’
Yuri spotted movement on the desolate ground outside: what looked like tremendous cockroaches, with wide, iridescent wings. They were humans, some kind of astronauts, surface workers, in suits like segmented armour, in brilliant silver. Those wings spread wide from the back. As the rover approached, one of them stood straight and waved. No face was visible behind a golden dome of a helmet. Yuri, bemused, waved back.
Then there were flashes at the windows, brilliant enough to light up the whole interior of the rover. Beth recoiled, rubbing her eyes.
‘Sorry.’ Kalinski pressed a screen, and covers closed over the windows. ‘Camera flashes. I told you there’d been leaks. Your faces will be all over the inner system already. Those guys must be being paid well to risk the discipline charges.’
The rover slowed, and Yuri heard a dull impact on the opaque hull, some kind of docking. Within seconds the hatch opened again, leading to a brightly lit tunnel.
‘Here we go,’ Kalinski said. ‘Dome Z. I’ll be going through decon too, having been in contact with you, and the Hatch. We’ll have to strip, I’m afraid; your clothes will be cleaned and returned later. Men that way, women this, follow me . . .’
At the other end of the tunnel, Peacekeepers waited for them, in containment suits, heavily armed.
For Yuri and Tollemache, it took four days, of showers, heat baths, body fluid samples, full-body scans, tasteless meals, interrogations of various kinds, and periods of uneasy sleep, before the doctors finally slipped off their surgical masks and shook their hands. ‘It’s been a unique experience, gentlemen. Thank you.’
‘Kiss my ass,’ said Tollemache. ‘Where are my pants?’
As it turned out their clothes were not returned to them. For one thing the colonists’ scraps of stem-bark cloth were the first samples of Arduan life solar-system-based scientists had got their hands on directly, since the sparse samples returned by the Ad Astra years earlier. There were even anthropologists on hand, Yuri learned, eager to pore over the handicrafts of the emergent human communities of Proxima c.
Tollemache was given a fresh Peacekeeper uniform. Yuri noticed it was beefier than the old design, with toughened pads at shoulders, neck, elbows, knees, and a kind of utility belt with pouches and loops, ready for weapons. Evidently Peacekeeping in the modern solar system was a more dangerous game than it used to be. For his part, Yuri was handed an orange jumpsuit just like the kind he’d been issued with when he was first pulled out of the cryo tank on Mars. Some things didn’t change.
They were brought to a kind of lounge, with padded couches, a bar serving soft drinks and coffee, and a big picture window with a view of the battered surface of Mercury, shaded from the sun. Here at last they were reunited with Mardina and Beth, and Colonel Kalinski. Mardina was already devouring coffee, picking up where she’d left off at the Hub base on Per Ardua. She wore a smart astronaut uniform, black and silver. Beth, though, was in an orange jumpsuit like her father’s.
Beth hugged Yuri. But they pulled apart, uncertain, dressed up in strange clothes, even smelling wrong. Yuri forced a smile, uncertainly.
Yuri helped himself to a soda. It bubbled oddly in the low gravity; he’d never had a soda on Mars. ‘So, twenty-eight years after waking up on Mars—’
‘Thirty-two,’ Kalinski murmured. ‘You jumped another four years in the Hatch, remember.’
‘Shit. Here I am back in a jumpsuit, like a convict.’
Beth came over and linked his arm. ‘Never mind, Dad. I’m a convict too.’
‘Yeah. The difference is the uniform looks good on you.’
‘And I still have this.’ She stroked the tattoo that covered half her face. ‘They couldn’t scrub that off in their decon. But, you know, they offered to remove it for me there and then. Said I’d fit in better.’
‘You’d “fit in”. Where?’
‘Earth,’ Mardina said bluntly.
Beth stroked her tattoo again. ‘I’m not from Earth. I’m from Per Ardua.’
‘Quite right, honey,’ and Yuri kissed her on the cheek. ‘We’ll work it out somehow.’ He looked at Mardina in her ISF suit. ‘I’m surprised you let them dress you up in that thing. The ISF dumped you on Per Ardua.’
She looked at him steadily. ‘But I wasn’t born on Per Ardua. This was my career, Yuri. This is who I was, and am. I’m still an officer in the ISF, I’m told. Even though they haven’t figured out what rank I am; strictly speaking I was retired with honours when I was left behind at Proxima.’
Tollemache said, ‘There’s talk of back pay. You ought to chase that up, Jones. But we probably won’t need it, we’re all going to ea
rn a fortune out of this.’ He grinned, gulping down some kind of fruit drink. ‘What a break! I bet those assholes Brady and Keller will be sick as shit when they hear about this.’ He mused, ‘In another four years’ time, I guess. Good. Give me time to milk it before sharing it with them.’
Yuri looked at him in disgust. ‘You really are a charmer, Tollemache.’
He just laughed. ‘You got to take your chances in this life.’
‘Good point,’ said a newcomer, a man, old, short, plump, bustling into the room. ‘That Hatch of yours, Peacekeeper Tollemache, could be a chance for all of us – an opportunity crucial to the future of two stellar systems, and to the whole destiny of mankind.’ In his eighties maybe, he wore what looked like a business suit, with thin lapels, a kind of cravat, shiny fake-leather shoes. Behind him came another man, tall, grave, thin as a builder’s stem limb, in a well-cut astronaut uniform with officer stripes on his upper arm.
Kalinski stepped forward with a professional smile. ‘Good to see you, sir. I need to introduce you. This is Sir Michael King—’
This was the tubby businessman type. He winked at Kalinski. ‘Stef, your twin sends her regards.’ Then he strode forward and shook all their hands; his grip was surprisingly firm, a worker’s handshake. ‘I’m president and CEO of Universal Engineering, Inc., the prime contractor with responsibility for developing the resources of Mercury on behalf of the nations and peoples of the UN.’ He studied Yuri. ‘You’re the fella from the ice, right? Rip Van Winkle. What do you call yourself – Yuri Eden? Well, I’m the guy whose company built the ship that took you to Mars, and the Ad Astra that delivered you all the way to Proxima Centauri. What do you think of that?’
‘Thanks,’ Yuri said drily.
‘And I just drove in from Mars on a hulk ship myself, once I heard the news about you people. This is my closest colleague on Mercury,’ King said, indicating the tall man in the astronaut suit.
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