‘Don’t be absurd.’ She sat with them for a moment more, evidently offended. Then she stood, brushed off the dust, and walked away, back towards the shuttle.

Jenny protested, ‘What did you have to say that for? We were getting on so well.’

He shrugged. ‘She’s only playing at being your friend. Indulging herself. What does she care? She’ll be gone in a couple of days. Nothing we say to her makes a difference.’ For all his defiance Yuri found the prospect of the shuttle leaving, the last link to Earth breaking, terrifying. It was like the prospect of death, an irreversible cut-off. He could see the others felt the same. The difference was, he tried not to show it. Whereas Jenny seemed to think that if she behaved ingratiatingly enough the astronauts might somehow change their minds and take her home. Well, they wouldn’t. He said, ‘Do you want to go back, or will you stay to help me finish this?’

She grumbled, but she stayed, the full hour it took for Prox e to emerge from its eclipse. Then they covered over their gear, packed up, and walked back the way they had come, Jenny in sullen silence.

CHAPTER 13

On the tenth day, the day the shuttle was due to leap back to orbit and rejoin the Ad Astra, Major Lex McGregor called a meeting. A final briefing, he said, for the colonists.

The weather was hot, clear, and the light from Proxima Centauri was heavy. McGregor had an array of fold-out chairs set up in the shade of one of the shuttle’s wings, but they were for the crew and the Peacekeepers only. Yuri found himself sitting with the rest of the colonists in the dirt at the crew’s feet, in the glaring Prox light. Abbey Brandenstein, the killer of Joseph Mullane, was set away from the rest, her arms still cuffed behind her back.

McGregor, lean, smart, his black and silver uniform showing not a speck of dirt, his blond mane shining in the Proxima light, walked up and down before this assembly. He looked fit after his daily regimen of runs around the lake. He had a comms set clamped to his head as he paced; he was keeping them waiting, for a briefing that was presumably going to set the pattern of the whole of the rest of their lives, as he took a call from his buddies on the ship. ‘Yeah . . . Yeah . . . You’re kidding! OK, later, Bill.’ He shut the set down, chuckling. ‘Those guys! What kidders. Ah, well.’

At last he turned to the group on the ground before him. He turned on a smile, beaming like a proud headmaster, Yuri thought. ‘So here we are. The end of the mission for us, in a sense, with just the chore of going home remaining. But for you, of course, it is a beginning – the grandest of beginnings, the birth of a new community, a new world. What a day! And how appropriate that the weather’s so good.

‘But, you know, it did occur to me that you ought to rename this new world of yours. “Proxima c” will scarcely do. That’s an astronomer’s term, not a name for a home. As far as I know none of the other groups have come up with a name yet. You could be the first. So, any ideas?’ He looked around the group.

Everybody seemed faintly stunned to Yuri, unresponsive.

‘Oh, come now. Anybody want to make history?’

At last Mardina Jones spoke up. ‘How about, “Per Ardua”?’

‘I beg your pardon, Lieutenant?’

‘That’s the rest of the phrase that the ship’s name comes from. Ad Astra, you know? The full phrase is, Per ardua ad astra. Through adversity to the stars. It’s the motto of the NBRAF – the North Britain air force, I did some training with them, even though they don’t contribute to the ISF. I think it’s originally from an old Irish family motto.’ She glanced around at the dusty plain, the unmoving star. ‘We’ve brought them to the stars. For these people the adversity is still to come.’

McGregor looked disappointed. ‘Really, Lieutenant, that’s hardly the spirit.’

John Synge, a colonist Yuri barely knew, had once been a lawyer. Now he raised his hand. ‘Per Ardua. Seconded. All those in favour say aye.’

The rest murmured in response, apathetically.

McGregor glared at Synge, frustrated, as if his carefully worked-out presentation had already been spoiled. ‘If you must,’ he said at last. ‘Per Ardua it is. Well, you’ve seen the cargo we’ve unloaded in the last few days. Equipment for you all to use, right? From shovels to slates, even, so you can keep diaries of your pioneering days. Everything you need to build a new homestead here. And now—’ his smile returned ‘—I have a final gift for you all.’ He turned and clapped his hands.

From the shadows of the shuttle’s open hull a mechanism rolled forward. It had a squat six-wheeled base like a small car, and an upper section that was vaguely humanoid, with a torso bristling with manipulator arms of all sizes, and a clear plastic dome for a ‘head’ from within which camera lenses peered, glittering. The lower body was covered with manufacturers’ and sponsors’ logos.

Looking faintly embarrassed, Mardina captured everything with her shoulder-mounted unit.

‘As promised,’ McGregor boomed, grinning widely. ‘Colonists of, ah, Per Ardua, meet your autonomous colonisation unit! The best that UN dollars can buy.’

The unit rolled to a halt. ‘Greetings,’ it said. ‘I am your ColU.’ Its male-sounding voice was clipped, with a neutral mid-Atlantic accent, like a UN Security Council translator, Yuri thought. Its cameras whirred and panned. ‘I am looking forward to getting to know you individually and as a group, and to serving you all. I host a level seven IntelligeX artificial sentience, as you can probably tell. I have significant self-direction and decision-making capabilities, and am additionally capable of responding to your emotional needs. You may wish to give me an informal name. With this model “Colin” is popular—’

‘ColU will do,’ snapped John Synge.

‘ColU it is,’ the unit said. It rolled to a stop. With a hiss of hydraulics, panels opened up in its flanks, revealing glistening internal equipment, like metallic intestines. ‘I contain all you need to initiate your self-sustaining colony. I have a soil-maker to process the native dirt into a suitable habitat for Earth life. I also contain various autonomic and semi-autonomic systems to progress farming efforts. And an iron cow, a manufactory to process grass into meat grown from stem cells. The heavy equipment I can deploy includes well-drilling gear and trench-cutters.

‘Other support services I can offer include medical; I can treat traumatic injuries of various kinds, and can synthesise anaesthetics, antibiotics and other essentials. I contain a matter-printer fabrication unit which can produce such components as replacement bones, even some ranges of artificial organs. Later in the process I will be able to serve as a user-friendly “teacher” unit for your sturdy pioneer-type children. And I—’

‘Thank you,’ McGregor said. ‘I think that’s enough for now.’

The ColU rolled back modestly, closing itself up. The ‘colonists’ just stared, silent.

McGregor resumed his pacing. ‘I want to take this last chance to emphasise for you what a marvellous chance you people have been given. I know many of you skipped the briefings in flight—’ he eyed Yuri ‘—and perhaps for the rest of you it didn’t seem . . . well, real. To colonise the planet of another star! It is a centuries-old dream, yet here we are. Here you are. And what an opportunity you have.

‘There are drawbacks to living with a red dwarf star like Proxima, I don’t deny that. It is a flare star, as you know. You have built your shelter, and the ColU can help; you can harden your bodies with vitamin supplements, atropine injections and so forth, and there are post-exposure therapies.

‘However the advantages are huge.’ He lifted up his face to Proxima, and raised his arms. ‘Dwarf stars are tremendously long-lived, compared to stars like our own sun. Both kinds of stars burn hydrogen in the core. But in our sun the helium waste product of the fusion process accumulates; once exhausted, the core will one day collapse and blow the rest apart, leaving most of the sun’s hydrogen unburned. Whereas in Proxima tremendous convection cycles operate, dragging the hydrogen from the outer layers down into the core, until it is all consumed. Our sun has only maybe a billion years of useful lifetime left to it. Proxima, though so much smaller, is so efficient it will keep shining for trillions of years – thousands of times as long . . .’