‘I think so.’

‘What must we do? We were far enough from the flash for it to have done us no immediate harm, I think. God bless inverse-square spreading. What comes next?’

Penny seemed to think it over. ‘There’ll probably be a particle storm. Like high-energy cosmic rays. Concentrated little packets of energy, but moving slower than light. They’ll be here in a few hours. Hard to estimate.’

‘OK. Maybe I should cut the drive for a while, turn the ship around so we have the interstellar-medium shields between us and Mercury?’

‘Might be a good idea.’

Beth didn’t understand any of this. ‘And what of Earth? What’s become of Earth?’

Penny looked back at her. ‘Life will recover, ultimately. But for now …’

McGregor began the procedure to shut down the main drive and turn the ship around. His voice was calm and competent as he worked through his checklists with his crew.

Beth imagined a burned land, a black, lifeless ocean.

As it turned out, she was entirely wrong.

With the drive off, and the acceleration gravity reduced to zero, the crew and passengers of the ISF kernel hulk Tatania took a break, from the situation, from each other. Beth unbuckled her harness, swum out of her couch, and made her clumsy way to the bathroom, locked herself in, and just sat, eyes closed, trying to regulate her breathing. Trying not to think.

But then she heard the rest talking, and the crackle of radio messages. Voices, speaking what sounded to Beth like a mash-up of Swedish and Welsh. Thirty minutes after the kernel drive had been shut down, and the screen of high-energy particles and short-wavelength radiation from its exhaust dissipated, the first signals from the inner system were being received by the Tatania’s sprawling antennas.

Gathered once more on the bridge of the Tatania, the passengers and crew listened to the fragmentary voices, staring at each other, uncomprehending. Beth looked around the group, in this first moment of stillness since the Tatania had flung itself away into space from Earth’s moon.

Herself: Beth Eden Jones, thirty-six years old, born on a planet of Proxima Centauri but brought back to Earth by a mother who was now, presumably, burned to a crisp on Mercury – but not before she had forced Beth to take this new journey into strangeness.

General Lex McGregor of the ISF: a monument of a man in his seventies, commander of this space fleet ship, looking professionally concerned but unperturbed. Even his voice was soothing, or at least it was for Beth. McGregor, like Beth’s father Yuri Eden, was British, but McGregor had grown up in Angleterre, the southern counties of England heavily integrated into a European federation, while Yuri had been born in an independent North Britain, and to Beth’s ear McGregor’s accent had the softest of French intonations as a result.

Penny Kalinski: some kind of physicist who had known Beth’s mother, herself nearly seventy, looking bewildered – no, Beth thought, she was scared on some deeper level, as if all this strangeness was somehow directed at her personally.

Jiang Youwei: a forty-year-old Chinese who had some antique relationship with Penny, and who had got swept up on the wrong side of the UN-Chinese war that looked to have exploded across the solar system.

The two young members of the Tatania’s bridge crew: junior ISF officers, male and female, looking equally confused. But, Beth thought, as long as McGregor was around and captain of this hulk, they didn’t need to think, didn’t need to care, regardless of the bonfire of the worlds they had fled and now the utter strangeness leaking through the communication systems. McGregor would take care of them. Or such was their comforting illusion.

And, creepiest of all, Earthshine: an artificial intelligence, with the projected body of a smartly dressed forty-something male, and a look of calm engagement on his face – an appearance that was, Beth knew, a mendacious simulation, a ghost of light. The closest to reality Earthshine came was an ugly lump of technology stowed away somewhere on this vessel, a store of the memory and trickling thoughts that comprised his artificial personality. He was a creature who, with his two ‘brothers’, locked deep in high-technology caverns on the Earth, had exerted real power over all humanity for decades.

And he’d told her his true name, or one of them: Robert Braemann. He’d known Beth would understand the significance, for her.

All her life, and especially since being brought to Earth against her will, she’d been reluctant to get involved in her parents’ past: the muddled old Earth society from which they’d been expelled before they’d come to the emptiness of Per Ardua, planet of Proxima Centauri, where Beth had been born, her home. Nothing had changed in that regard now. She could see Earthshine was still waiting for some kind of reaction from her. She turned away from him deliberately.

McGregor swivelled in his command couch and surveyed them all with a kind of professional sympathy. ‘I know this is difficult,’ he began. ‘It’s only days since we fled what was apparently a catastrophic war in the inner solar system. We feared – well, we feared the destruction of everything, of the space colonies, even the Earth itself. We had no specific destination in mind. My mission, mine and my crew’s, was essentially to save you, sir,’ and he nodded to Earthshine. ‘That was my primary order, coming from the UN Security Council and my superiors in the ISF, in the hope that you could lead a rebuilding programme to follow.’

‘And the rest of us,’ said Penny Kalinski drily, ‘were swept up in Earthshine’s wake.’

McGregor faced her. He was still handsome, Beth thought, despite his years, and he had a charisma that was hard not to respond to. He said, ‘That’s the size of it. Of course you, Ms Jones, are here because – well, because I owed a favour to your mother. Ancient history. However, whatever the fates that brought us together, here we are in this situation now. As to what that situation is …’ He glanced at his juniors.

Responding to the prompt, the young woman raised a slate. Aged maybe twenty-five, Beth guessed, she was solidly built with a rather square face; her blonde hair was tightly plaited. A tag stitched on her jumpsuit read ISF LT MARIE GOLVIN, alongside the ISF logo. Beth noted absently that she had a small crucifix pinned beside the tag.

Tapping at her slate, Golvin summarised quickly. ‘Sir, we accelerated for a full gravity for three days. We shut down the drive, but we’re still cruising, at our final velocity of just under one per cent lightspeed.’ She glanced around at the passengers, evidently wondering how much they could understand of the situation. ‘We set off from lunar orbit and headed directly out from the sun. We’re currently three astronomical units from the sun – that is, deep in the asteroid belt. And still heading outward.’

‘But now we’re looking back,’ Earthshine said. ‘Now that the drive exhaust is no longer screening our ability to look, and listen. And, instead of news from a shattered Earth, we’re receiving—’

‘Messages, all right,’ Golvin said. ‘But messages we don’t understand.’

She tapped her slate, and fragments of speech filled the air, distorted, soaked by static, ghost voices speaking and fading away.

‘To begin with,’ Golvin said, ‘these are all radio broadcasts – like twentieth-century technology, not like the laser and other narrow-beam transmission methods the ISF and the space agencies of our competitors use nowadays. In fact we picked them up, not with the Tatania’s comms system, but with a subsidiary antenna meant for radio astronomy and navigation. The messages don’t seem to be intended for us – they’re leakage, essentially, that we’re picking up fortuitously.’

Jiang said, ‘Maybe these are from scattered communities, on Earth and beyond. Radio is all they can improvise. Requests for help, for news—’