She walked out of the lock and stood by Titus. Mardina followed, more uncertainly. The dome itself, lit by small, hanging lamps, was a silvery, translucent roof that excluded the sky. Even Andromeda was reduced to a washed-out crimson glow. The ground was bare rock, blackish like some kind of basalt, scraped and grooved – presumably by the action of ice across millions of years. Stef looked over at the central clutter of gear. There was Earthshine’s support unit, clearly identifiable, embedded in a nest of other equipment. There was no sign of Earthshine’s avatar projection.

Titus said, ‘The air smells – funny. Like a ship. Or a factory.’

Stef’s senses were dulled by age, but she agreed. ‘I smell ozone. No scent of people, or not much—’

Mardina wrinkled her nose. ‘Maybe my nose is sharper. I can smell a hint of sewage. Yuck. Not unlike what we smell like in the mornings, after a night under the canopy. They are here, then. My father and Inguill.’

Titus snapped, ‘Well, we can’t hover by the door all day. Clodia! With me. We will organise the work of moving our equipment in. Beth and Chu have made a start.’

‘Bring in the ColU first,’ Stef suggested. ‘It will help us make sense of all this …’

Soon the ColU was set on a heap of grubby blankets just inside the lock, and Mardina had hung its sensor unit around her own neck.

Then, as the pile of their belongings gradually accumulated inside the lock, a puddle forming at its base as residual ice melted in the warmth, Stef and Mardina approached the Earthshine unit.

The processor pillar stood at the centre of what looked like a sculpture of a spider, itself a few metres tall, with angled rods hingeing from the central unit and plunging into the rocky ground. The rods seemed to Stef to be made of some kind of ceramic, milky and smooth. The pillar itself had long lost the wheels Beth had described, on which it had rolled around the planet. Stef could see that the casing of the support unit had been broken open, much of its innards removed or redeployed.

Because of the framework of rods they could get no closer than a few metres from the central unit. Beyond the support unit Stef made out what looked like a manufacturing area of some kind, with various devices littering the ground – devices of an uncertain function, but an oddly smoothed-out appearance. The materials used seemed to be similar to the ceramic-like substance of the spider legs.

And beyond that, set in the ground, that open Hatch.

Stef faced the support unit. ‘Earthshine. Are you in there?’

‘You took your time.’

The voice sounded as authentic as ever, but there was still no sign of a virtual human body, any of his ‘suits’ as he’d once called them, Stef recalled.

Mardina said, ‘Hello, Great-grandfather. We did come as fast as we could. Given that you abandoned us in the first place …’

‘Mardina, I can see you, even if I’m not much to look at. Come closer, child … My word. You’re pregnant!’

Mardina blushed.

‘The dynasty continues,’ Stef said drily.

‘If only for now. Who is the father?’

‘Chu Yuen,’ said the ColU, speaking from the slate at Mardina’s neck – and, perhaps, directly to Earthshine by other means, Stef thought. ‘You recall, the slave from the Rome-Xin Culture who is my bearer. An intelligent boy, evidently of good stock, even if he did fall on hard times.’

‘A good father, then. I look forward to getting to know him better. And I already know you too well, ColU.’

‘I told you on Mars – on that other Mars – that I would hunt you down, wherever you fled.’

‘And so you have. Well done. Perhaps you will do me the courtesy of hearing about what I have discovered here …’

Stef was starting to feel dizzy. ‘I’m too hot, damn it, after months of being too cold.’ She began to pull ineffectually at her outer coat.

At a call from Mardina, Beth and Chu hurried over with blankets from the cart, and heaped them up on the rocky ground. Beth helped Stef remove a few layers of clothing, and Chu handed her a canteen of water, brought in from outside – icy, but refreshing – and they sat her down on the blankets. Beth and Mardina sat with her, and soon Stef felt a lot more human. She refused food, however. ‘If I never eat another mouthful of freeze-dried potato I won’t be sorry.’

Earthshine said, ‘I, of course, need no food of that sort. But since the arrival of the others one of my fabricators has been devoted to manufacturing human-suitable food from the raw materials of the environment – broken-up rock, organics filtered from the ice.’

The others. It was the first time he had mentioned Ari and Inguill, even tangentially.

‘A fabricator.’ Mardina frowned. ‘What’s that?’

‘Advanced technology from our own timeline,’ the ColU said. ‘A device that can take apart matter at the molecular level, or even below, and assemble it into – well, whatever you desire. It’s slow but effective. My own physical frame once contained such machines. Once Earthshine and his two brothers, artificial intellects as powerful as him, lurked in holes in the ground, on Earth. And they were surrounded by fabricators and other gadgets, like miniature factories, that used the raw materials of the planet to supply them with all they needed – materials for maintenance, energy.’

Earthshine said, ‘I carried such gadgets with me in this support module. Now, here, I have broken them out and have put them to work. Everything you see here, the dome, this framework around me, has been manufactured from local materials, the rocks, the ice. Over on the far side of the dome I have created a pond, a body of standing water, to refresh the air. As for energy, though I have an internal store of my own, I have plumbed the planet itself for its inner heat. Manufactured drills to penetrate the surface rock layers …’

Stef asked, ‘Why did you build all this?’

‘I came here because of the Hatch, Stef. To study it, and its makers. That’s why we were brought to this planet in the first place, to this epoch – what other reason could there be? That’s what I’ve been doing since I got here, primarily. But I always expected you, some of you at least, to follow. So I prepared this habitat.’

‘Generous of you—’

‘Although I did not expect those others to be the first of the group to come here.’

Mardina pushed herself to her feet. ‘ “Those others.” You mean my father and the Inca woman, don’t you? You keep hinting they’re here, but I don’t see them. Well, there’s only one place they can be.’ She set off towards the open Hatch.

Beth called, ‘Be careful, Mardina.’

But Mardina didn’t slow her pace.

Stef said now, ‘This frame you’ve put up around yourself, Earthshine. You’ve rooted yourself into the ground. Is this part of your thermal energy mine?’

‘Oh, no,’ he said now. ‘You’ll see that outside – a few panels flush to the ground, deep bores beneath. All this is to achieve a more intimate kind of contact.’

Beth asked, ‘Contact with who?’

‘The Dreamers,’ the ColU said suddenly. ‘You’re trying to talk to the Dreamers, aren’t you?’

‘This ancient world is infested with them,’ Earthshine said. ‘Well, I imagine it always was. ColU, it is as if I have dropped an antenna into a brain. And I think—’

‘Yes?’ The ColU sounded breathless, eager.

‘I think I hear their thoughts …’

And Stef Kalinski heard a gunshot.

CHAPTER 70

Mardina, who had been approaching the open Hatch, threw herself down on the ground.

Chu and Titus were with her faster than Stef would have believed possible. Sprawling, they grabbed Mardina by the arms, slithered back along the ground, and delivered her to Stef and Beth. Beth took her pregnant daughter in her arms.

To Stef, Mardina looked shocked, furious.

‘I’m not hurt, Mother. Really, I’m not. I heard the shot – I thought I saw something fly past me – I dropped to the ground – I guess it was a warning shot. I can’t believe he did it. My father.’