Angelia 5941, still embedded deep in her family, felt the sudden lurch of the deceleration, saw with distributed senses the blaze of Proxima light reflected by the mass of castaways.

Still she continued her helpless prayer. Not me. I have come this far. Let me be the one in a million who survives; let the others die before me. Why not me? It must be one of us . . .

But prayer was futile.

The casting-out was instant, brutal. It was as if she had been torn from another mould, and flung into space. Suddenly she was surrounded by a great crowd of sisters, she was one in a great fall of snowflakes, each of them shining by the light of Proxima. And there in the centre of it all was the core ship, blazing bright with reflected light, but with more sisters being hurled off its face even as she watched. There was no way to communicate with the core, or with her castaway sisters, or even with distant Earth, not any more; she was alone now, alone for ever. She saw all this in an instant.

Then her own huge velocity flung her away from the core, out into the dispersing crowd, which scattered all around her like fragments from some tremendous explosion.

THREE

CHAPTER 31

2173

Stef Kalinski was summoned to Earth. Specifically to the office of Sir Michael King, at the corporate headquarters of Universal Engineering, Inc., in Solstice, Northwest Territories, United States of North America.

Summoned. To be called peremptorily like this was galling.

Major Stef Kalinski, twenty-nine years old, was now a full professor at her home institution in Vancouver, and also an officer in the International Space Fleet. She had worked hard to get here. Attaining a rank in the ISF had been a pain in the butt, and, in order to pursue parallel careers since the age of twenty-one, she had had to forgo such luxuries as a personal life. But the ISF had been the only route by which she could get an assignment to the one laboratory where the most exotic physics known to mankind was being pursued: the Wheeler Research Facility in Jules Verne, a farside crater on the moon, the only place in the solar system where you could get to properly study a kernel – unless you were allowed down to Mercury itself, which she wasn’t.

Her strategy had paid off. She was pretty eminent now; you only had to look at her publication and citation record to see that. She liked to think that if her father was still alive he’d have been proud of her, even if she had ended up studying the very phenomenon which had ruined his own career – but he had died years before, in an open prison on the fringe of the desertified core of France.

And now here was this ‘invitation’. The note she received even had a designated place and time, with attached clipper transit tickets, even before she’d agreed to go.

But it was a summons from Sir Michael King himself. After decades at the top King was still the big cheese at UEI, which in turn was still the primary paymaster at Verne, a notionally UN-run establishment, thanks to the immense profits UEI had made from patenting kernel technologies. And, as some of her colleagues half-joked, behind King was said to be the shadowy figure of Earthshine, one of the tremendous artificial minds that had been running much of the planet for nearly a century. You didn’t mess with Earthshine, they joked. Or half-joked.

Stef’s policy was to ignore such chatter and try to focus on what she wanted. At eleven years old, she had been there on the very day when the International-One, UEI’s first hulk, had lumbered into space from the sun-blasted plains of Mercury. Now those mighty kernel-driven ships criss-crossed the solar system, and had even set off for the stars. But she wasn’t allowed on Mercury, where the kernels were. Because of tensions with the Chinese, who still had no access to kernel technology, security around the kernel mines was ferociously tight, too tight for her. If this was a door opening a crack, a chance to get closer to the kernels, not just the tame handful that UEI had allowed to be shipped to the moon – well, she had to take it.

So she packed a bag.

Leaving the moon on a rocketship was unspectacular.

The UEI clipper’s crew squirted their thrusters to leave lunar orbit, and set off on an unpowered trajectory to Earth. Following a low-energy orbit, it would take Stef three days to fly from the moon to the Earth, just as it had been for Armstrong and Aldrin in Apollo 11 almost exactly two centuries before. And it was going to stay that way, even though mankind was now building ships powerful enough to reach the stars themselves. The use of anything other than minimum-energy strategies in the Earth-moon system had been banned by international agreement. The fragility of Earth in the face of interplanetary energies had become obvious in the days of the Heroic Generation, when the first really large structures had begun to be assembled in orbit around the Earth. In a few cases geoengineering technology itself had actually been weaponised: droughts and floods, for instance, had been inflicted on enemy nations.

At least the in-flight facilities were a little more advanced than in the Apollo days – including the sealed-off Love Nest at the rear of the main passenger cabin, which some of her fellow passengers used assiduously, and Stef ignored. She tried to work. And she spent long hours in the ship’s small gymnasium, using equipment adapted for microgravity, stressing her muscles against elasticised harnesses and shoving against a kind of robot sumo wrestler, preparing her body for Earth gravity after years at Verne, on the moon.

With the three-day transit over, the clipper skimmed Earth’s atmosphere and blipped its retro-rockets to settle into a high-inclination orbit of the planet, from which it would descend to land at the young city of Solstice, in the Canadian far north. It was a routine manoeuvre; all Earth’s passenger spaceports were at high latitudes these days, because that was where the dominant cities were – though commercial and military cargoes were still launched from more energetically efficient but climatically challenging equatorial sites, like Kourou. And as the clipper looped over the Earth waiting for final clearance to land, the passengers were given a grandstand view of much of the planet’s surface.

The face of Earth continued to evolve, following the huge shocks of the climate Jolts of the last century. At the coasts, much transformed thanks to the nibbling of sea-level rise, solar-power farms were spreading through the shallow waters of the flooded shores and river valleys, sprawling artificial meadows of gen-enged grasses supplying electricity grids through modified photosynthesis. This was part of a conscious global strategy to minimise the use of any energy source on the home planet save sunlight, because any other method meant an injection of additional heat to the world’s global balance.

Meanwhile, across the continental interiors, as glaciers vanished, aquifers were exhausted and the rain just stopped, the mid-latitude regions had been largely abandoned. Looping over the arid plains of Amazonia, southern Europe, Asia, even much of the territory of the old United States, Stef saw few signs of modern humanity save huge solar-cell farms. Great old cities still glittered in the intense sunlight, but there was nobody moving in there but archaeologists and historians, workers for resource extraction companies, and a few extreme-experience tourists exploring lost cities that, to the rising generation, were already half legend: New Orleans, Saigon, Venice, even the nuked remains of Mumbai.

The great population adjustments caused by the Jolts had all but run their course; the pandemics were over, the refugee flows had dwindled, and political alliances, even national boundaries, had been redrawn. Now new generations were growing up in brand-new cities set up in latitudes that would once have been seen as too extreme, in the very far north, and even the far south, on the coast of an increasingly ice-free Antarctica. Cities such as Solstice, near the shore of the Great Bear Lake, sitting precisely on the Arctic Circle in a northerly state of the new United States of North America into which Canada, with huge concessions from its suffering southern neighbour, had been absorbed.