Beth was sitting alone, wrapped in a blanket – no, not alone, Stef realised; she was close to the winking unit of the ColU, her friend from childhood. Beth had seemed unable to move far from the Hatch since it had been closed over Mardina and Chu and Gwen. Stef found it hard to blame her, and nobody was minded to force her away. But now Beth was clutching a kind of crude doll to her chest: Mister Sticks, a toy from her own childhood, made for her by the ColU when it still had a body and manipulator arms to do it. This copy had been made from dry Arduan stems by Clodia, under the ColU’s strict instructions.

Stef poured out two mugs of tea, and carried them over to Beth. ‘May I join you?’

‘Why not?’ Beth’s voice was bleak, empty. But she responded reflexively when Stef handed her the tea, moved along her bench a little, and let Stef sit down. Stef pulled a blanket over her own shoulders, and reached under layers of cloth until she found Beth’s hand.

‘So we are all here,’ Earthshine said. ‘I take it you still don’t want a countdown—’

Titus snapped, ‘No, we do not!’

‘Very well. But, Stef, you may wish to have your slate to hand.’

‘Damn.’ She’d forgotten about that. Just as they’d decided, she and the ColU and Earthshine were going to keep monitoring the science of this event, as long as they could. She had to rummage under her blanket in her capacious pockets until she found the slate, dug it out and wiped its surface clean of bits of lint with a corner of her blanket. Here was another survivor, she thought, another relic of a different universe. She wondered where she’d first picked it up. Mars? The moon? Never imagining that it would still be here with her now, in such a place, at such a time.

The screen lit up with displays: simple counts, graphics. She scanned the material quickly, immediately understanding the most basic implication. ‘There’s a radiation surge. It’s already started, then.’ She felt dismay at the first physical proof of the end: it was real after all, just as Earthshine had predicted, despite all their efforts to believe otherwise.

‘In a sense, yes,’ said the ColU. ‘Already we’re seeing high-energy radiation, heavy nuclei – rather like cosmic rays. A flood of it coming backwards in time. And pretty bad for your health, by the way.’

She had to laugh. ‘What, we’d all be dead of radiation poisoning in a year? Remind me not to renew my life insurance.’

‘It’s going to ramp up from here. Soon we’ll be seeing new heavy nuclei, elements nobody ever saw before – or named. Stef Kalinski, you’ll be the greatest explorer of exotic physics that ever lived.’

‘Yeah … So how are you feeling, ColU? Do you understand what is about to happen to you?’

‘Yes, Stef Kalinski. I am to be turned off at zero.’

‘Well, that’s close enough.’

‘It may be easier for artificial intelligences to understand than humans, organic creatures, in fact. The possibility that consciousness may terminate, suddenly: anybody fitted with an off-switch knows all about that.’

Beth stroked its shell. ‘Good luck, ColU. And thank you.’

‘Thank you for loving me,’ the ColU said, to Stef’s surprise.

The dome lights flickered once, twice, and failed.

Even Stef’s slate went down. She patted its surface, and set it aside. The end of science.

The ColU said, ‘That’s probably the radiation. Earthshine and I have hardened power units. We should keep functioning a little longer.’

Now the only glow came from the sky, from the sprawl of Andromeda – a tremendous galaxy doomed to destruction just as was her own feeble frame, Stef thought. Her friends were shapes in the dark around her. And as her eyes adjusted Stef began to see the stars above.

Earthshine whispered, ‘The wolves that have always chased day and night through the sky are catching them at last …’

Under the blanket, Beth’s fingers tightened on Stef’s.

Stef heard Titus take a long, satisfying draught of his beer. Then he said, ‘You know, this reminds me of a time on campaign when

FIVE

CHAPTER 75

Earthshine’s protective egg broke open around them, just as it was supposed to, dumping Mardina, Chu and the baby on the floor of the Hatch pit, with all their bits of gear.

But the Hatch lid was open above them. Looking up, Mardina saw a slice of what looked like the roof of a dome – higher, more solid-looking than the one Earthshine had built.

Mardina clutched her baby and stared at Chu. ‘Alive,’ she whispered.

‘Alive. But where?’

‘Or rather, when?’

Gwen, half asleep, yawned hugely.

‘Come on,’ Mardina said softly. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

They had a lightweight, fold-up ladder fabricated by Earthshine for just this instance. They dug it out of the baggage and the shell shards littering the pit, quickly set it up against the wall, and Chu scrambled up. He didn’t look around, Mardina saw; he had eyes only for his family, still in the pit. He reached down. ‘Pass her up.’

Mardina took a couple of steps up the ladder, and then, clumsily, lifted up the bundle that was Gwen. They fumbled the handover, making Gwen squirm and grumble, and they laughed.

‘Look at us,’ said Mardina. ‘Two idiots, travelling in time.’

‘But we’re here.’

‘That we are.’

Once Chu had Gwen safely in his arms, Mardina scrambled quickly out of the pit herself, and took back the baby.

Then they stood together and faced a new world.

They stood on a smoothly finished floor, of neatly interlocking tiles. Over their heads soared that dome, and now she could see it fully Mardina could make out its scale; it was indeed much wider, taller than Earthshine’s improvised tent. There were smaller buildings, structures under the dome, banks of machinery, some kind of towering monument at the very centre of the dome – there was a smell of industry, of electricity, and all of it brilliantly lit by suspended fluorescent lamps.

In this first moment, clutching the baby, Mardina could take in none of the detail. She looked up at the sky, which was easily visible through the dome.

‘No Andromeda,’ said Chu. ‘A starry sky. And look …’

There was one very brilliant pair of stars, close to the zenith.

Mardina raised herself on the balls of her feet, rocked up and down. ‘How does the gravity seem to you?’

‘The same as before. And you?’

‘Yes … I think we’re still on Per Ardua. But a younger Per Ardua. Before the double-star system they all spoke of from the olden times broke up and drifted away. Maybe that’s it up there, the Hoof of the Centaur. We have our star charts. Maybe with those we could figure out where we are – or rather, when.’

‘Or,’ Chu said, ‘we could just ask.’ He pointed to the centre of the dome.

Where a woman stood with her back to them, making some kind of note on a scroll. She stood beneath that central monument – which, Mardina saw now, was a pillar of stone, finely worked, engraved with what looked like Latin letters to Mardina though she didn’t recognise the words, and with a kind of lightning-bolt sculpture of steel at the very top.

And an animal came bounding around the corner of the monument, heading straight at them.

A dog? No. It ran on two legs. It was feathered green and crimson, as gaudy as any Inca priest she’d ever seen, like a running bird, perhaps. But its head was huge, and nothing like a dog’s, nothing like a bird’s, a big blocky head dominated by a huge jaw – a jaw that opened now, and the animal roared.

They’d both been frozen with shock. Now Chu reacted. With one hand he pulled Mardina and the baby behind his body, and with the other drew his pugio dagger and took a stance. ‘Stay back!’

The woman by the monument turned at the noise. ‘Halt, Hermann!’

To Mardina’s huge relief the beast slowed immediately, skidding to a stop on the smooth floor. She saw now that its feet were clawed, each talon longer than Chu’s pugio. For a heartbeat it stared at its prey with evident anguish.