‘But if they don’t back down,’ Penny said quickly. ‘Just suppose – if they don’t agree, and they call your bluff – would you drop the rock? Would you really do it?’

But Shen would not reply. Neither Jiang, nor Wei Ling the helpful young soldier, would meet her eyes.

Earthshine, locked in his avatar, spun and whirred. ‘Just think, Colonel Kalinski. If not for the kernels, if not for the damn Hatch, we’d be sitting here now discussing joint missions to Jupiter. Instead we’re facing interplanetary war. I wonder if whoever planted that damn material on Mercury knew it would lead to this.’

Jiang gently touched Penny’s arm. ‘I prescribe coffee. Come . . .’

SEVEN

CHAPTER 68

2213

‘They’ve taken Thursday.’

Liu stood before Yuri’s desk, in an expensive but grimy coverall; he’d evidently been out in the fields. Liu Tao was in his seventies now – nearly two decades older than Yuri, physically, after Yuri’s four-year gaps in the Hatch. Yuri thought he had never seen him so agitated.

Twelve years after Yuri’s return from Mercury they were both rich, both powerful – but only in their own little pond, this small world of Per Ardua, and every so often they were handed a reminder that there were far mightier forces at work in their universe. Here was Liu talking about his twenty-two-year-old daughter being apprehended, probably for little more reason than the crime of being half Chinese. He looked as helpless as he must have been on the day his Chinese rocketplane had fallen out of the sky into a UN-controlled enclave on Mars.

Yuri touched a slate built into the surface of his desk – old mahogany, imported from Earth and carried through the Hatch from Mercury by human beings, fantastically expensive. ‘Stef? I think you’d better get in here.’

‘On the way.’

‘Sit down, Liu.’

‘Damn it, Yuri—’

‘Sit down. Stef’s on the way. We’ll find a way to handle this.’

Stef Kalinski came into the office. She had a redolent scent of builder stem about her; among her other projects, she was trying to extract more details of the builders’ own deep past and their engagement with the exotic technologies of the Hatch. In her sixties herself, Stef was still a multitasker, and it could be difficult to get her to focus. But as soon as she saw Liu standing there, obviously agitated, he was the centre of her attention. ‘Tell me how I can help.’

Yuri went to the coffee pot and poured three brimming mugs. This was Arduan coffee, cultivated and processed at the Mattock Confluence. Yuri liked to import treasures from Earth as luxuries, but as a policy he bought local. ‘Liu says Thursday’s been arrested.’

Stef’s eyebrows shot up. ‘What? Who by? I guess the UN—’

Liu said, ‘The security troops at the Hub.’

Yuri tried to make light of it. ‘What did she do, throw a brick at them? They’ve been winding down the detachment there.’

‘Not arrested,’ Liu said, barely holding it together. ‘Confined. They put her in one of their camps.’

‘Ah. Oh, shit.’

The internment camps were a recent, and unwelcome, development, and a sideshow of the war gathering in the solar system.

Since Yuri and Stef Kalinski had returned through the Hatch together twelve years ago to a volcanic winter, things had slowly got better climate-wise on Per Ardua – which was a good thing as the immigrants from Earth through the Hatch had started to arrive almost immediately. But recently, things had evidently been getting worse politically back home. The flow of people through the Hatch had slowed to a trickle, as the inner system’s resources were devoted to the gathering interplanetary conflict rather than to shipping emigrants around the inner planets. Indeed, many of the UN troops stationed here at Per Ardua had been sent back to the solar system.

But some of the UN’s Cold-War type security strictures had been imposed here on Per Ardua, as back home. And, it seemed, there were still enough troops to spare the time to pick up Liu Tao’s daughter.

Yuri grunted. ‘What the hell they think they’ll achieve with internment camps here on Per Ardua I don’t know. This is our country, our world. It’s like an infection of paranoia, spreading through the Hatch. The sooner the last UN trooper drags his sorry arse back through the Hatch the better.’

‘Which,’ Liu said, ‘is probably the kind of rhetoric that got Thursday in trouble. She’s fallen in with some of those youth movements. “Ardua for Arduans” – you know. Any kind of activity like that is dangerous if you’ve got Thursday’s ethnic background. Yuri, we’ve got to get her out of there.’

‘Of course we’ve got to. The three of us, we’ll go into the Hub together, and we won’t come out without her. OK?’

Liu didn’t seem relieved, or reassured, but at least he seemed gratified at the support, and to be doing something about it. ‘I’ll drive.’

‘Like hell. In your state you’ll kill us all. Stef, go fetch a rover.’

Stef nodded. But as the three of them stood stiffly – three old people, aware of their age when they moved – Stef murmured to Yuri, ‘You shouldn’t make promises you can’t be sure you can keep. Bad habit, Yuri . . .’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘I know the UN and the ISF a lot better than you do. Be ready for the worst.’

CHAPTER 69

Away from the UN base at the Hub – as the substellar zone had come to be known, the area of Per Ardua most firmly controlled by human authorities now ironically labelled with a builder name – rovers and other vehicles were still rare, still precious. Since the Ad Astra, there had never been another starship visit to Per Ardua, and any heavy-duty machinery imported from the solar system had to be broken down into components and carried through the Hatch, usually on the backs of immigrants. But Yuri Eden, Stef Kalinski, Liu Tao, the triumvirate who dominated the community at the Mattock Confluence, were about the richest, most powerful people on Per Ardua, away from the island of UN influence itself at the Hub. They had done well in skimming off the wealth and power associated with the one-way immigrant flow over the last decade.

So a rover was soon provided for them.

Stef Kalinski drove rapidly, steadily, safely, inwards to the Hub. Though she was as much an absorbed intellectual as she ever had been, Yuri observed that Stef had found ways to fit in, here on this very different world. Thanks to her ISF military training she had come equipped with common sense, courage, and practical competences. And, Yuri suspected, she was a lot happier with a thickness of four light years between her and her unwanted ‘twin’ – though even after all this time he still wasn’t sure he believed all the kooky stuff she’d tentatively shared with him about that. In any event, Stef was a silent, focused driver, even when she let the rover navigate itself. That wasn’t unwise, as the world, still recovering from its volcanic winter, was an unpredictable place.

Liu sat silently too, staring at the road ahead as they drove south. For him the ride was clearly just an interval to be endured before he got on with the issue of saving his daughter.

So, in the quiet, Yuri had time to stare out of the window at his changing world.

This road, metalled in places, was a rough descendant of the track he and Mardina and the rest had trodden out as they had marched south to the substellar all those years ago, heading upstream along the course of the great river system that flowed north out of the Hub uplands – a feature now called, logically enough, the North River. For years the track had run across a frozen landscape. Now the road ran on thawed-out but firm ground past meltwater lakes, and on rough bridges over gushing tributary streams.