Mardina was utterly baffled. ‘Come with you where?’

Ari’s eyes were alight with a kind of greed. ‘I think I understand. You’re talking about another jonbar hinge, aren’t you? Like the gate between your history of the UN and China and our own with Romans and Brikanti, and again between our worlds and the world of the Drowned Culture … I know your own history ended in a war of cosmic savagery, with the release of huge energies. Is that what you’re planning here, Earthshine? To create a hinge?’

Mardina stared at him, barely understanding. ‘Father. The way you’re talking. You sound as if you want this. As if you want everything to be smashed up – everything we’ve grown up with, everything our ancestors built.’

‘Perhaps I do,’ Ari said, and he stood and began to pace. ‘Perhaps I do. Ever since these strangers wandered into our lives – and especially ever since I discovered the evidence of the Drowned Culture for myself – I’ve become addicted to the idea. Addicted – yes, that’s the word. To see everything change in a trice – to see new possibilities for mankind and human expression unfold, before one’s eyes – perhaps to have the power to shape those possibilities. How could any thinking person not be drawn to such an idea?’

‘Billions would die, Ari,’ Penny said softly. ‘No, it’s worse than that. Billions would never have existed at all.’

‘But others would take their place. Don’t you see? It would be like looking through the eyes of a god.’

The ColU said, ‘That’s probably blasphemous, in terms of your interpretation of Christianity. And it’s also wrong. You would be looking through the eyes, not of a god, but of whoever it is who welcomes these adjustments – and whoever has engineered them.’

Ari frowned. ‘And who might they be?’

Penny said, ‘We don’t know, not yet. But we know that their meddling in history has nothing to do with our benefit. It is all about what they want.’

‘Which is?’

‘Kernels,’ she said. ‘And Hatches, Ari. Hatches. Of the kind you and your Roman rivals are merrily building for them, all over the nearby star systems, without ever understanding why, or what they’re for. We know that much.

‘But there’s more to this, isn’t there, Earthshine?’ She held him with her gaze. ‘We’re skirting around elements of a deeper mystery. You came to Mars to explore this noostratum of yours. A layer of bacterial mind, deep in the rocks …’ She stood straight, stiffly. ‘My God. I never thought of it before. Could there be some connection? The Hatches, after all, provide lightspeed links between worlds …’ She faced Earthshine. ‘Are the noostratum minds your Hatch builders, Earthshine? Maybe they aren’t just witnesses. And they are everywhere, presumably, on every rocky world … They are the puppet masters, who control the lesser beings, us, on the planet surfaces. Is that what you’re thinking?’

Earthshine just smiled. ‘What is important in this situation, Penny Kalinski, is what I want of them.’

‘Which is?’

‘For them to reply to me. The Martian noostratum – yes, the Hatch builders, as I believe they are. You know I have been trying to communicate with them – you saw the experimental set-up. All I have wanted is a reply.’

‘And now? Earthshine, you look rather pleased with yourself.’

‘So I should be. The noostratum. It has replied. And it has given me the means to save you all.’ He gestured to a door. ‘This way …’

CHAPTER 32

Höd grew visibly in the monitors of the Celyn now, heartbeat by heartbeat.

‘It’s coming at us so quickly,’ said Gerloc.

Her voice was small now, Kerys realised, with little remaining of the cool competence of the young officer who had held her position by the Celyn. The difference was, Kerys supposed, unlike herself and Freydis, Gerloc hadn’t had the time to get used to all this – to being trapped in a speeding mote of a vessel, caught between two colliding cosmic bodies. Like a fly, she thought, between the tabletop and the descending fist.

Freydis, at least, was calmly checking her instruments. ‘We’re approaching our full speed now. We’re actually moving far faster than Höd itself; most of the closing velocity is ours.’

Gerloc stared through a thick window. ‘It is the eye of a god, opening slowly.’

Kerys snapped, ‘No mythology now, Gerloc. It is just a lump of rock and ice. A big one, and representing awesome energies. But it is not divine. And if not for human intervention, it would not be here at all, high above Mars.’

Freydis said, ‘We have less than half an hour to closest approach. When we arrive, we’ll pass by the thing before we can count to ten. If we’re going to do something, we need to decide soon.’

‘Do something? Such as what?’ Gerloc asked.

Kerys glanced at Freydis, who she was sure understood the full situation, and shook her head. Not yet. Let Gerloc work it out for herself. She said aloud, ‘Still no response from the crews on the surface?’

‘None,’ Freydis said. ‘I think there’s still activity down there, however. Höd hasn’t been abandoned, and the big kernel banks are still firing.’

‘A suicide crew, then.’

‘It looks like it. And if so, they won’t welcome visitors.’ Freydis glanced at Gerloc. ‘You understand we can’t land. We don’t have the power, the time, to slow down and make a rendezvous.’

‘Of course I understand that,’ Gerloc said dismissively.

‘Even if we could attempt some kind of landing they’d probably try to shoot us out of the sky first,’ Kerys said. ‘And even if we had come earlier, it was probably always too late – Höd is probably too close to be deflected anyhow, by any conceivable push even from the kernel banks. Small tweaks to its momentum from far away: that’s how Höd has been delivered onto this course. It was worth a try, though. To come, to try to talk to the surface crew.’

Gerloc nodded. ‘Then if we can’t deflect the asteroid, what can we do?’

Kerys glanced at Freydis, and closed her eyes. ‘There may be one option. I have to tell you something very strange, Gerloc, and I apologise that there is no time to explain it fully. There are people in our universe – some of them are down there on Mars now – who are not from our history. They do not share our past. Freydis understands some of this … Now, Gerloc, the important point is this. That history was ended with a terrible war, at the climax of which a tremendous mass – some kind of huge ship I think – was slammed into the surface of the planet Mercury. They called it the Nail. In their history, as in ours, Mercury was the source of the first kernel mines.’

Freydis put in, ‘This has been studied in our own academies, based on the strangers’ description. There was a tremendous detonation – a huge release of energy. It’s thought that the kernels, caught up in the impact of the incoming mass, opened wide in response. And the release of energy—’

‘It was enough to scorch worlds clean,’ Kerys said.

Gerloc looked at Freydis, and then at Kerys, who closed her eyes. ‘I think I understand where this is leading. So we crash the ship into Höd – and not just at any random point. Directly onto the kernel banks. In the hope of blowing this lump of ice apart with kernel energies.’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘Thus saving Mars.’

‘And, with any luck, averting a war on Terra.’

‘Well, if that’s your plan, we have a lot of work to do to make it happen, and not much time to do it in.’

Kerys grinned. Not a word about the sacrifice of their own lives – just the mission objective. ‘Good response. And you’re right. We need to turn the ship around. Shut down the kernel drive first, use the secondary thrusters to swivel her. Then we light up the drive again, so that when we come down on Höd, it’s with our own kernels blazing away.’