‘I’m sure with your practical skills, your training, you’ll be a fine addition to this pioneering group . . .’

Yuri saw John Synge, Harry Thorne, Onizuka exchanging glances. The Peacekeepers tensed. Yuri, sensing trouble coming, stood himself, grabbed Lemmy’s arm and pulled him behind his back.

‘Let’s get them,’ Onizuka said, quite calmly. ‘Let’s get off this fucking dump.’ And he picked up a rock and charged.

Of course they had no chance. The charging men were felled in the first salvo of anaesthetic darts. McGregor himself took out Mardina immediately; she dropped to the ground in her smart astronaut uniform. Matt Speith ran away. Abbey Brandenstein, cuffed, in the dirt, just laughed.

Then it looked as if Mattock was going to go for the women. When he raised a riot stick to Pearl Hanks, Lemmy yelled, ‘No!’, pulled away from Yuri, and ran forward.

And Yuri followed.

The two Peacekeepers seemed to have been waiting for him to give them an excuse. They charged straight at Yuri.

Mattock was on him first, slamming him to the ground with a punch to the throat before Yuri had the chance to raise an arm to defend himself. ‘You’re the future of mankind, you little shit,’ Mattock snarled. And he kicked Yuri in the head.

The ColU, administering simple medicine to the injured members of the group, brought Yuri round before the shuttle took off.

Then Yuri sat with Lemmy and the others, including Mardina Jones, silent, clearly furious. They watched as the bird screamed back down the trail it had laid down across the dry lake bed and lifted effortlessly into the air.

And then, as the undercarriage raised, something fell out of the port wing. It tumbled like a rag, buffeted by the shuttle’s slipstream, before falling to the ground and lying limp.

Lemmy got up and looked hastily around the group, counting heads. ‘Who’s missing? Jenny. That was Jenny Amsler, stowing away in the wing. Stupid bitch.’

‘And then there were ten.’ Lemmy laughed, nervous, but nobody joined in.

The shuttle turned its nose upwards and screamed up into the static light show that was the sky of Proxima c.

CHAPTER 14

2155

‘This is Angelia 5941. This voice message, which is expressed in non-technical language and contains personal comments as well as summaries of scientific and technological achievements, is intended for public release, and accompanies a more technical download.

‘Good morning, to Dr Kalinski, and to Bob and Monica and all my ground crew, and of course to Stef, my half-sister. I have calculated it will be dome-morning in the operations room in Yeats when this message reaches you, in nearly six days’ time.

‘Sixteen days after launch I am in an excellent state of health, and all subsystems are operating nominally.

‘I have now completed my cruise through the outer reaches of the solar system. Strictly speaking I entered interstellar space about a day after the microwave beam cut-off at the end of acceleration. At that point I passed through the heliopause, the boundary where the thin wind that blows between the stars dominates over the weakening stream from the sun. But since then I have passed through many interesting domains: the radius of the sun’s gravitational focus, where light from distant stars collects, after ten days, and I emerged from the Kuiper belt of Pluto-like ice worlds some days after that. But I am still in the sun’s realm, for I am now passing through the mighty Oort cloud, a sphere of comets around the solar system which it will take me years to cross.

‘At this point my configuration changes. In the spaces between the stars there are dust and ice grains – this is known as the interstellar medium – it is sparse, but if I were hit by even a single grain significant damage could be done. Dexter Cole’s craft carried generators to power a mighty magnetic field and laser bank which shattered, electrically charged, and deflected any threatening grains. I, with much less power than was available to Cole, have a more passive defensive strategy.

‘I am designed to take up a new form. Actually I am made of programmable matter – essentially a form of smart carbon – and I can take any shape I like. I walked on Mercury in the form of a young woman. Here, on the edge of the Kuiper belt, I am like a tremendous radio-telescope dish. Now I will change again. I will fold down to a needle shape, with a one-square-centimetre cross section and a length of no less than a kilometre, and a density about that of water. I will be like a javelin, spearing straight at Proxima Centauri. And I myself, Angelia 5941, will be like a droplet of water lost in the bulk of that javelin. With such a small cross section, you see, the chances of my being damaged by a grain of dust are much reduced. Of course while I am in this “cruise mode”, without an antenna, I will not be able to communicate with Dr Kalinski.

‘I should say why I identify myself as Angelia 5941.

‘I am not one Angelia, but a million. Each of us is a sheet only a few tens or hundreds of atomic diameters thick – each of us virtually a single carbon molecule in the form of a hundred-metre disc. We were born in a facility at an Earth-moon Lagrange point, a point of gravitational stability in space, a place of dark and cold and quiet; we were peeled, one by one, from a tremendous mould, given our own identities, and then united.

‘Each of us separately, though each massing no more than a droplet of water vapour in a fog, has capabilities. Each of us has sentience. In a sense my entire structure is a kind of neural net, and I began learning from the moment I was “born”. Our separate sentiences were merged for a while, for my journey to Mercury and during my time there living in the human world, and then to receive the microwave acceleration pulse at launch. But our individuality survived this merging, and the de-merging that followed.

‘The ability we have to peel off copies of ourselves will be essential when we arrive at Proxima. I know this much about the later stages of the mission, but little else; the software updates concerning deceleration and system exploration are to be downloaded into me later, after further refinement during my ten-year cruise.

‘But the facility is to be used during the cruise also, for communication purposes. Some of my multiple selves have been cast away from the main body of the craft, combining to form a reflecting dish much wider than any of us individually. With this I can pick up messages from home, and send replies. Also my scattered sisters collect the energies of the thin, sparse sunlight that reaches this remote radius, and use that to power my systems, including comms. Those cast-off sisters sacrificed themselves for this purpose; pushed away by the sunlight they cannot return to the main body. From a million, we can spare a handful! And I am assured that these disposed-of copies have minimal sentience; they do not suffer in any meaningful sense.

‘You may ask why it is me, Angelia 5941, who addresses you. We discussed this, we Angelias, and ran a lottery based on a random-number programme, and I was selected as spokesperson. It is an honour I embrace.

‘I will wait for your reply, Dr Kalinski, before assuming my cruise profile. And then, like Dexter Cole before me, I will sleep between the stars until my next scheduled communications attempt . . .’

‘Is this on? Oh, I see.

‘This is George Kalinski. Good to hear from you, 5941. Your telemetry is coming through fine, and I can see that all your subsystems are functioning as they should. Good. Of course it will take another six days for this message to crawl back out to you. Monica, what time will it be when it gets there? Afternoon. OK. So, good afternoon from Mercury.

‘You know this is the last time we’ll speak to you from Mercury. Now you’re successfully launched we’re going to up sticks and relocate to a control room back on Earth, in New Zealand, in fact, in some nice mountainous country with a fine view of Alpha Centauri on a summer night. So the next time you speak to us – when the hell will it be? Anyhow that’s where we’ll be, so you can think of us there.