Stef did have to show up at drinks parties and other functions at her father’s side. Of the trillionaires’ club Michael King was the only one who displayed any kind of interest in her personally, as opposed to treating her as some kind of appendage of her father. When she was introduced by her father, King, avuncular, a glass of champagne low-gravity sloshing in his hand, leaned down and looked her in the face. ‘Good clear eyes. Unflinching gaze. Curiosity. I like that. You’ll go far. You keeping up at school, Stephanie?’

‘It’s Stef. Yes, I think so. I like—’

‘What are you missing here?’

‘Missing?’

‘You’re an Earth kid, stuck on Mercury. What’s the one thing I could sell you, right now, that you miss the most from home?’

She thought that over. ‘Soda,’ she said. ‘Decent soda. Here it’s cold enough, but it’s always flat. Same on the moon.’

‘Yeah. This champagne’s kind of flat too.’ King glanced at her father. ‘Something to do with the low gravity, George? The low air pressure in the domes, maybe, messing with the carbonation? Soda. I’ll make a note of that and follow it up. Could be you just earned me another million, kid. So what do you make of all this?’ He waved his glass at the people milling around, the conversations going on high above Stef’s head.

‘I feel like I’m lost in some kind of forest of talking trees.’

King barked laughter. ‘Good for you. Honest answer, and a clear impression. Witty too. Listen to me. I know you’re only a kid – no offence. But you should watch and learn, as much as you can. Textbooks are one thing, people in the wild are another, and it’s the people you have to work with if you want to get on.’ His accent was broad Australian, his enunciation crisp, precise, easy to follow. ‘Look at me. I started out from a poor background. Well, everybody was poor in Oz in those days because of the Desiccation. I made my first living as a coastal scavenger, I was no older than you, we’d go down into the wrecks of oil tankers and seawater-processing factories that had been deliberately beached on the shore, retrieving what materials we could haul out, all for a few UN dollars a day.

‘But then age twenty I joined UEI as an apprentice programmer, and after ten years I was on the board. A lot of our early work was deconstruction, taking apart filthy old nuclear reactors. Of course by then we’d relocated to Canada, I mean the northern USNA region as it is nowadays, because Australia, along with Japan, the Far East countries, chunks of Siberia, had become part of the Framework, the Chinese economic empire . . . Well, the details don’t matter. Now here I am about to launch a new breed of spaceship. How much more success could you want? And you know how I got this far?’

‘People,’ she said brightly.

He grinned at her father. ‘George, you got yourself a smart one here. That’s it – people. I had contacts. I knew who to approach in the finance and governance community at national, zonal and UN levels, as well as the technical people, to get it done. Because I’d cultivated those contacts at events like this over years and years. Now it’s your chance, and it’s never too early to start.’

Her father snorted. ‘Don’t give me all that, Michael. Your most important contact isn’t human at all.’

‘Earthshine, you mean.’

‘Or one of his Core-AI rivals. Everybody knows they’re your ultimate paymasters.’ Her father looked around the crowd, almost playfully. ‘Got an avatar or two here, has he? Should we be watching what we say?’

‘Funny, George, very funny. But I don’t think – oh, excuse me. Sanjai! Over here!’

And that was it, as he hurried away to another encounter.

Stef liked Michael King, she decided, whether or not he really was backed by the sinister old Core AIs, entities she found hard even to imagine. Her father sneered about King’s lack of academic or technical qualifications, but Stef was drawn by his energy, his focus, his vigour, and she stored away his advice.

But she forgot all about Michael King a couple of dome-days later, when the astronauts showed up.

They were the human crew of King’s new ship the International-One.

When they walked through a room all the faces turned to the astronauts, like iron filings in a magnetic field. It was like royalty, like King Harold of North Britain, or some media star, or maybe like the Heroic Generation engineers back in their heyday, her father said. They were authentic space pioneers, and all of them were dressed in the uniform of the UN’s International Space Fleet, an eye-popping jet black spangled with glittering stars.

And what drew her attention most was the only member of the I-One crew who wasn’t in his fifth decade. Lex McGregor was from Angleterre, the south of Britain – the independent north had not contributed to the ISF – Lex was blond, as tall as the rest, and he was just seventeen. He wasn’t quite part of the crew, it seemed; he was a Space Fleet cadet, still in the early stages of his training. But he’d shown enough promise to win some kind of internal competition to serve as the one cadet on board the I-One for its maiden flight.

‘And the fact that he is as photogenic as hell,’ Stef said to her father, ‘probably didn’t harm his chances.’

He laughed. ‘Much too cynical for your age. Probably right, though. Don’t say “hell”.’

‘Sorry, Dad.’

Just as Lex was the closest person here to Stef’s age, so she was the closest to his, and they kind of gravitated together. She was relieved when he didn’t treat her like some bratty kid. He called her ‘Kalinski’, like she was a cadet herself.

They would play dumb games and make up athletic competitions in the domes; he was good at figuring out rules so he was handicapped and she had at least a chance of winning. One of her favourites was the roof run, where you ran at a curving dome wall and up it, overcoming the low gravity, sticking to the wall by sheer centrifugal force until you fell back, and then (in theory) executed a slow one-third-G somersault to land on your feet on the cushioned floor. A space cadet’s training regime was pretty intense, and she suspected there was still enough of the kid in Lex to relish the chance to blow off some steam, even to bend the rules a little.

Which was probably why it was Lex who introduced her to her father’s starship.

CHAPTER 5

It was a dome-morning, only a few days before the launch of the I-One. The Angelia’s launch was scheduled a couple of dome-days after that. Paradoxically Lex had more free time just now, as the ISF controllers were trying to get their crew to relax before the stress of the mission.

So Lex invited Stef to ‘take an EVA’, by which he meant go for a walk on Mercury’s surface.

He met her at a suit locker built into the dome wall. He grinned when she showed up. ‘Thought you weren’t coming, Kalinski. You didn’t seem keen.’

‘I’ve been out on the moon. What’s so special about a bunch of rocks?’

He winked at her. ‘This is different. Take a look at your suit.’ He palmed a control.

A section of the wall swept back, to reveal a row of suits that looked like nothing so much as discarded insect carcasses. Each had a hard silvered shell to cover torso, legs and arms, a featureless helmet with a gold-tinted visor, and wings, extraordinary filmy affairs that sprouted from joints behind the shoulders. All the suits had markings of various kinds, coloured stripes and hoops, no doubt to identify who was wearing them.

Lex asked, ‘What do you think?’

‘Ugly.’

‘It’s not so bad. Believe me, you won’t even notice it once you’re out there on the surface. I bet you can’t guess what the wings are for.’

‘It’s obvious. To radiate heat.’

‘Very good,’ he said, sounding genuinely impressed. ‘Most of the folk in this dome say, “For flying.” Then they catch themselves and say, “But there’s no air here so . . .” ’