McGregor peered at him, searching for a reaction. ‘What are you thinking, man from the past?’

Peacekeeper Tollemache was more direct. ‘Ha! He’s thinking, what a prick I am. You thought you were on Earth, didn’t you? Why, you fucking—’

Yuri couldn’t punch a star, but he could punch Tollemache. He got in one good blow before Mardina Jones, this time, knocked him out.

It was going to be a long three years, seven months.

TWO

CHAPTER 4

2155

When Yuri Eden discovered he was on a starship, it was only a little more than a decade after the maiden flight from planet Mercury of a ship called the International-One, the first demonstrator of the new kernel-drive technology that propelled the Ad Astra. Lex McGregor, then seventeen years old and an International Space Fleet cadet, had taken part in that flight.

And it was thanks to McGregor that Stephanie Penelope Kalinski, then eleven years old, had first got to meet her father’s starship, created from another technology entirely.

It seemed strange to Stef, as she and her father took the long, slow, unpowered orbit from Earth in towards the sun aboard a UN-UEI liner, that there were to be not one but two new kinds of ships, the International-One and the Angelia, launched from such an unpromising place as Mercury at the same time.

Her father just rolled his eyes. ‘Just my luck. Or humanity’s luck. If I was a conspiracy theorist I would suspect that those damn kernels have been planted under Mercury’s crust in order that we would find them now, just when we are recovering from the follies of the Heroic Generation, and reaching out, with our own efforts, to the stars . . .’

Stef wasn’t too clear what a ‘kernel’ was. But she was interested in it all, the different kinds of ships, the experimental engineering she’d glimpsed at her father’s laboratories back home on the outskirts of Seattle, the rumours of these energy-rich kernels being brought up from deep mines on Mercury . . . She understood that the International-One was just some kind of interplanetary-capable technology demonstrator, while her own father’s ship, though uncrewed, was going to the stars, the first true interstellar jaunt since the extraordinary journey of Dexter Cole, decades before. But she’d heard hints that these kernels they’d found on Mercury, and which were going to power the I-One, were actually much more exotic than anything her father was working on.

This was the kind of thing that always snagged her attention. She was doing well with her schooling, scoring high in mathematics, sciences and deductive abilities, as well as in physical prowess and leadership skills. Her father had been paradoxically pleased when she had been flagged up with a warning about having introvert tendencies. ‘All great scientists are introverts,’ he’d said. ‘All great engineers too, come to that. The sign of a strong, independent mind.’ But Stef was always less interested in herself than in all the stuff going on outside her own head. The I-One’s interplanetary mission was a lot less ambitious than the Angelia’s, but it was the I-One that had the hot technology. She was more than interested in it. She was fascinated.

She didn’t much enjoy the cruise from Earth, though. She had followed the mission profile as their ship descended ever deeper into the heart of the solar system, ever closer to the central fire, and Stef had come to feel oddly claustrophobic. Apparently the UN-led countries and China, who had carved Earth up between them, had shared out the solar system too, but China dominated everything from Earth orbit outward, from Mars and the asteroids to Jupiter’s moons. Looking out from the cramped centre of the system, China seemed to Stef to have the better half of it, with those roomy outer reaches, families of cold worlds hanging like lanterns in the dark.

On Mercury they landed at a big engineering complex in a crater called Yeats. This was not far from the equator, so that during the planet’s day the big looming sun was high in the sky, pouring down the light and energy that fed the square kilometres of solar-cell arrays that carpeted much of the crater’s floor.

The gravity was lower than home, about a third, and in the high domes, built big so they could house the industrial complexes expected to sprout here in the future, you could go running and leaping and break all kinds of long-jump records. That was interesting, and fun.

But for Stef the charms of Mercury quickly palled. It was hot enough to melt lead outside, at local noon anyhow. They had come here in the morning on this part of Mercury, and since the ‘day’ here lasted a hundred and seventy-six Earth days (a number that was a peculiar product of the planet’s slow rotation on its axis and its short year, that had taken Stef a while to figure out), the big sun just hung there, low in the sky, dome-day after dome-day, and the long shadows barely moved across the crater’s flat, lava-choked floor. There was, in the end, nothing on Mercury but rock, and there was only so much interest she could feign in solar-cell farms, or even the monumental pipeline systems they had built to bring water from the caches of ice in the permanent shadows at the planet’s poles.

And she had to spend a lot of time alone.

Her father was immersed in final tests and simulations for his starship, and Stef knew from long experience when to get out of his way. He’d been just the same when her mother was alive. The trouble was, unlike home, there was nobody else here much less than three times Stef’s age. Mercury was like a huge mine, drifting in the generous energy-giving light of the sun, and not a place to raise kids, it seemed; it was a place you came to work for a few years, made your money, and went back home to spend it. For all that the virtual facilities were just as good as back in Seattle, it got kind of boring, and lonely, quickly.

Things got a bit better as more people started to show up, shuttling in from Earth and moon for the launches.

There were actually two crowds arriving here, Stef quickly realised, for the two separate projects, the Angelia and the International-One. Her father’s project, the Angelia, was basically scientific: a one-shot uncrewed mission to Proxima Centauri intended to deliver a probe to study the habitable world the astronomers had found fifty years earlier orbiting that remote star. Since that discovery, of course, a human had actually been sent to Proxima, a man called Dexter Cole, who, launched decades before Stef had even been born, had yet to complete his one-way mission; the Angelia, representing a new technology generation, would almost overtake him. The throng gathering to watch the Angelia launch were mostly scientists and experimental engineers, along with the bureaucrats from state and UN level who were backing the project. They were men and women in drab suits who spent more time staring into each other’s faces over glasses of champagne than looking out of the window at Mercury, a whole alien world, it seemed to Stef.

The International-One, meanwhile, was a project of a huge industrial combine called Universal Engineering, Inc. – UEI. Its chief executive was a squat, blustering, forty-year-old Australian called Michael King, and he came out here with a much more exotic entourage of the rich and famous. ‘Trillionaire-adventurers’, her father called them dismissively.

There were even a few Chinese, ‘guests’ of the UN and the UEI, to ‘observe’ the great events taking place here on UN-dominated Mercury, although it seemed to Stef that it was a funny kind of ‘observing’ where you weren’t allowed to have close-up views of anything important at all.