‘Who cares?’ Lemmy sifted a handful of dry dust. ‘Here we are sitting in shit. Who cares about billions or trillions of years?’

McGregor wasn’t put off. ‘Then care about this: care about billions of stars. Most of the Galaxy’s stars are dwarfs like Proxima, only a handful are like the sun. And now here you are, the first colonists of the planet of a dwarf star. Once it was thought that no such star could support a habitable planet. The world would have to huddle so close to its faint sun that it would have one face presented permanently to the star, one turned away; maybe the atmosphere would freeze on the dark side. But here you have the living contradiction of those fears. A thick enough atmosphere transports sufficient heat around the planet to keep the far side from becoming a cold sink. Why, it’s already evident that this world hosts its own native life of some kind, though that is irrelevant to our purpose.

‘If you succeed, no, when you succeed in taming this wilderness, this world of Proxima Centauri, you will have proven that mankind can colonise this ultimate frontier, a planet of a red dwarf star. And because there are hundreds of billions of red dwarf stars, and because they’ll last trillions of years, suddenly mankind’s future in this Galaxy is all but infinite. And it will all be because of you.

‘But there’s a catch.

‘Everybody wants to be a pioneer, you see. The first on the moon, like Armstrong. The first on Mars, like Cao Xi. Or they want to be a citizen of the tamed worlds of the future. Nobody wants to be a settler. Labouring to break the ground and build a farm. Their children growing up in a cage of emptiness.

‘Which is where you come in . . .’

There was a stunned silence.

‘Just a minute.’ Harry Thorne got to his feet. Harry was a hefty man, and he was evidently suspicious. The Peacekeepers, standing by, watched him warily. ‘I used to be a farmer. You know that, Major. Even if it was just urban stuff, farms on the thirtieth floor of a tower block. And I can tell you that that ColU won’t be much use if it has to serve many more than the ten colonists you’ve landed here.’

‘The target for this group was fourteen, of course. If not for the murderous uprising aboard the Ad Astra—’

‘There were two hundred of us on that starship. Where’s everybody else?’

Now Yuri saw the Peacekeepers, in the shade, finger their guns.

Harry Thorne was stone-faced. ‘Tell us the truth, astronaut.’

McGregor nodded gravely. ‘Very well. It has never been our intention to mislead you. But all things at the appropriate time, yes?

‘Here is the strategy. A strategy, I might add, that has been endorsed at the highest level in the UN. There won’t be any more colonists – not here, not at this site. Oh, all two hundred passengers, or the survivors anyhow, are being delivered to the surface. But we are making scattered drops, squads of fourteen maximum, across the planet’s day side. You must understand that the other groups are out of your reach – will be for ever out of your reach. Some are not even on this continent. We’ve worked it out. The lake here is akin to an oasis in the desert. The distances to the other groups are too extreme, and given the lack of water sources you could never reach them.’

‘You’re isolating us deliberately,’ Harry Thorne said. ‘You’re going to kill us off.’

‘It’s not like that. Ask the anthropologists. You can have viable communities founded by a small number of individuals – a surprisingly small number. You, and the members of the other groups, have all been chosen for your genetic diversity, your differences from one another. There are no known harmful recessive genes among you; even if there were, your recessives would not match. You have not been selected for this group at random, you see. And remember that a healthy woman can have maybe ten children in her lifetime. With that kind of growth rate, in just a few generations . . .’

Harry Thorne glared. ‘We’ll be sleeping with the daughters of our wives. Our children breeding with their cousins. What kind of policy is that?’

McGregor looked around at the colonists. ‘There’s no point debating this. The experts assure us this will work, genetically speaking. And demographically, planting a dozen or so seeds across the face of this world rather than just one delivers a much better chance that at least some of you, some communities like yours, will survive and flourish, and ultimately spread.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve been around space engineering long enough to appreciate the value of redundant components.’

‘ “Redundant components?” ’ John Synge’s reply was almost a snarl.

McGregor affected not to hear that. He became grave again now, and walked up and down before the rows of them seated in the dirt. ‘You must understand that you have no choice in this. And there are parameters by which you must live, rules you must obey.

‘You have no resources other than what we have unloaded from the shuttle. The Ad Astra will not return; the UN can’t afford another such flight. And we believe there will be no interstellar attempts by the Chinese for a century or more; according to our intelligence all their efforts are being devoted to the development of the solar system. So they won’t be showing up to save you either. Even the rest of your fellow pioneers on this planet are too far away to help, even if they had the resources. Furthermore, the ColU will last only twenty-five years, maximum. By then you must have equipped yourselves to survive, unsupported.’

Thorne snorted. ‘What do you mean by that?’

McGregor said sternly, ‘You must have children. You must raise them, you must have them farming for you, supporting you. Otherwise you will grow old, and you will die, one by one, you will starve to death in this place. There are other things you need to have done by then. To have established a forge, for instance, to be producing your own steel – the ColU can help you with that. But above all, you must have children, or you will not survive yourselves.’

John Synge said, ‘And what about the rights of those children? Who are you to condemn them, and their children, to lives of servitude on this dismal world – all to serve your ludicrous, Heroic Generation-type scheme of galactic dominance?’

Martha Pearson stood now. Yuri knew she came from old money on Hawaii; in her late thirties, she was tough, self-contained. ‘And what right do you have to condemn me and the other women here to lives as baby machines?’

Onizuka stood too. The Peacekeepers began to look more uneasy. Onizuka said, ‘There’s a more basic problem. Whatever your plan was, you’ve left us with six men and four women. Who’s going to get who? Which men will be without a woman? Will you decide this before you fly back up to the sky?’

McGregor responded by turning, almost gracefully, to a startled Mardina Jones. Without warning he’d taken her pistol from its holster. ‘Actually there will be five women. I’m sorry, my dear.’

Mardina, still reflexively recording the whole exchange on her shoulder unit, looked startled. ‘What the hell are you doing, Lex?’

‘You’re staying. Look, we had a conference about it, the other senior crew and I, under the Captain.’

‘A conference?’

‘Obviously we couldn’t consult with New New York, given the lightspeed lag. But we do have standing orders. Policies. If the numbers of the colonists fall due to wastage, and they have done, we are expected to make up the numbers by impressing members of the crew. This particular group needs more women. And, genetically speaking, you come from a group that is as remote from the rest as any on Earth—’

‘I’m an Aboriginal woman,’ she said, almost softly. ‘That’s why you’re doing this. Lex, have you any idea how I had to fight to build my career from a background like that, to get on that damn ship? And now, after all that, you’re going to dispose of me here, all because of what I am. An Aborigine, a woman.’