The river reached a sea, at a broad, sluggish estuary. The craft banked once more and, very low now, came back over the shore, over the estuary, and descended towards a flat, dusty country broken here and there by small lakes, and in the further distance a belt of forest. The descent seemed rapid now. Yuri could see fine details, individual rocks fleeing beneath the ship. The shuttle shuddered and tipped in the turbulent alien air. Yuri, clinging to the cuffs that held him in his seat, endured the jolting, and heard the clatter of fittings, loose panels, harness holders. Up front, somebody was noisily sick.

And they were down, suddenly, a crashing impact after which they bounced into the air, and slammed down again with a squeal of tyres and another sudden jolt of deceleration, this time hurling Yuri forward against his straps.

The shuttle slowed to a halt. The dust it raised soon fell back to the plain outside, revealing a washed-out blue sky, a rocky, stony ground.

Immediately Lex McGregor came bustling back through the cockpit door. He was pulling open the neck of his pressure suit; Yuri could see he was sweating hard. ‘Wheel stop and we’re down. You know, it was one small step for a man when Armstrong landed on the moon. But for you lot it’s one last step – right? The end of the line. Welcome to Proxima c.’

CHAPTER 9

The two astronauts went out first, of course.

Then the Peacekeepers released the passengers one by one, and escorted them out of the cabin. With an attendant Peacekeeper, they had to pass one at a time through an airlock, even though the air was supposedly breathable; the lock was evidently integral to the shuttle’s design.

Yuri waited for his turn, disoriented, bewildered – too mixed up, he thought, to be either fearful or excited about setting foot on this alien world. Maybe that would come later. Or not. After all, countless generations had dreamed of reaching Mars, and that had turned out to be a shithole.

At last it was his turn. Mattock cuffed Yuri to his own wrist, and tied his ankles with a length of plastic rope. Thus hobbled, Yuri shuffled ahead to the airlock, and climbed awkwardly through the narrow hatch, into the small chamber of the lock.

While the lock went through its cycle he sat on a small bench, facing a glowering Mattock.

‘Just give me an excuse,’ said Mattock.

Yuri grinned back.

A green light glared, and the outer hatch door popped open. Yuri saw a ground of pink-grey sand, individual grains casting long shadows. The air smelled of aircraft, of fuel and oil and a kind of burned smell of metal. But under that there was a subtler scent, an old, rusty tang, like autumn leaves in an English park, he thought.

Mattock nudged him. ‘You first.’

Yuri had to swing both his hobbled legs out through the hatch, and then he jumped down through a third of a metre or so to the ground, both his feet hitting at the same time. It felt like Earth gravity, he thought immediately, or about that.

He was in the shadow of the shuttle’s sprawling, still hot, jet-black wing.

He shuffled forward a few paces, into sunlight, and he looked up for the first time at the star, the sun of this world. It was a tremendous beacon in a bluish sky, not as brilliant as the sun of Earth, but still dazzling, and bigger to look at, three or four times the size of Earth’s sun. Other than that the sky was empty, save for a pair of brilliant stars, shining despite the bright daylight, and one disc of a planet hanging like a remote moon.

The other disembarked passengers were sitting in a circle in the dirt, a few paces from the shuttle. Mattock prodded Yuri to go join them. He edged forward, looking around as he walked. Beyond the group, he saw a lake glimmer, blue under the sky. Beyond that, a drab green belt that must be forest. And beyond that, folded mountains. There was no sign of people, no walls, no fences as far as he could see. No dome walls, like on Mars.

Lieutenant Mardina Jones stood over the passengers. She said to Yuri, ‘The air’s fine, isn’t it? A miracle, really. Given it’s another world, and all.’

‘I guess.’

She watched him curiously. ‘You know, Eden, you’re the only one who’s just stood here and – looked.’ She squinted up at the sun. ‘Strange to think, that sun will just hang there. Never rise, never set, not as long as you live.’

‘Really?’

She stared at him. ‘All those briefings we gave. You really have learned nothing, have you?’

‘Where’s everybody else?’

‘Who?’

‘The other groups. Brought down by the shuttle before us.’

‘A long way from here. Major McGregor will tell you all about it. In the meantime you go sit over there with those others. We’ve got supplies to unload for our stay here, and for your first few weeks and months as residents. Also a ColU.’

Yuri didn’t know what a ColU was. ‘And then you’re going?’

She slapped the hull of the shuttle. ‘This bird will scramjet its way back to the sky – yes, we’re going. Now, if I release your hobble will you go and sit with the rest?’

‘Yes.’

She bent down, took a knife from her belt, and slit through the hobble.

He took a step towards the seated group. Then another step, and another, and then broke into a run. A jog really, it was awkward with his hands tied together, but he could do this. He ran, stretching his legs, the dirt firm under his booted feet.

Ran right past the seated group, who whooped and hollered.

He heard voices behind him. ‘Hey, ice boy! Stop or—’

‘Or what, Mattock? You going to run him down? Ah, let him go. I mean, where’s he going to run to? A thousand klicks to the next group? He’ll be back. Look, give me a hand with this food pack . . .’

And Yuri ran and ran, on beyond the dust kicked up by the shuttle on landing, on over the virgin dirt, on far beyond the bounds of any cramped little Martian colony like Eden – on until their voices were small behind him, and when he looked back the shuttle sitting on its undercarriage looked like a black-and-white toy on a tabletop – on towards that forest, and the mountains.

That was why he was the last to hear that, sometime during the descent when attentions were otherwise engaged, Abbey Brandenstein had stabbed Joseph Mullane in the heart with a sharpened plastic toothbrush.

CHAPTER 10

2155

On Angelia’s last night in the human world, Dr Kalinski cherished her. That was how she thought of it, on later reflection.

Still in the form of her weighty humanoid body, she was taken to dinner with Dr Kalinski and his daughter Stef, and members of the control crew who would care for her during her ten-year flight to Proxima: people like Bob Develin and Monica Trant, competent twenty- or thirty-somethings, all employees of national space agencies now subsumed into a global UN agency which only the Chinese, their Framework partners and a few outliers like North Britain had declined to join. ‘Only’: much of interplanetary space travel, in fact, was dominated by the new Chinese empire. They spoke openly, loosely, treating Angelia as one of the crew, as human, sometimes even speaking as if she wasn’t there at all, which paradoxically made her feel more welcome, more included.

But she learned more about their concerns regarding the mission than Dr Kalinski had told her about before. That perhaps it was obsolete, technologically, before it was even launched, given the UEI kernel developments. That it wasn’t very popular politically in higher circles in the UN: it had a whiff of the Heroic Generation, whose projects had been characterised by massive, wasteful engineering, and loaded with AIs of a quality of sentience that had later been made illegal retrospectively. After all, Dr Kalinski had grown up in the wake of the Generation and their mighty works; maybe he was influenced by them. So the whispers went.