All save Beth.

‘What?’ Beth snapped. ‘What is it? What happened?’

Earthshine turned his weird artificial face to her. In the years she’d spent in the solar system Beth had never got used to sharing her world with fake people. ‘They have unleashed the wolf of war. We, humanity, we had it bound up with treaties, with words. No more. And now, this.’

‘They being . . .’

‘The Hatch builders. Who else?’

‘And you, you aren’t human. You say we. You have no right to say that.’

The virtual looked at her mournfully. ‘I was human once. My name was Robert Braemann.’

And she stared at him, shocked to the core by the name.

Lex McGregor turned to face Penny. ‘So this is the kernels going up. Right, Kalinski?’

‘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 . . .’

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

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.

CHAPTER 89

2217

On the day side of Per Ardua, the stars were invisible, save for Proxima itself, and the glorious twin primary suns of Alpha Centauri. But those who had followed Yuri and Liu and Stef in the exploration of the dark side, in the years following their pioneering trek, had rediscovered the night sky. A whole new generation had to be taught the constellations.

A distance of four light years wasn’t much on the scale of the volume of space that contained the thousands of stars visible to the human eye; the sky of Per Ardua’s endless night was pretty much like that seen from Earth, and save for the brilliance of the nearby Alpha stars the constellations were mostly very similar. Just as on Earth, Cassiopeia was a particular favourite, its W-shape easy to pick out. But as seen from Per Ardua, there was the addition of one dim star to that constellation. That pendant to the W was Sol, the nearest star to Proxima save for the Alphas, a grain of light that had been the site of all human history before the first missions to Proxima. Parents pointed this out to their children.

A little more than four years after the war, Sol flared so brightly that it was, briefly, visible even from the day side of Per Ardua.

CHAPTER 90

Stef looked at Yuri. ‘A gravity shift. Just like the Hatches on Mercury and Per Ardua. So we’re already there. Wherever there is. And in the outside universe more time has passed. Years, maybe, or—’

‘Or centuries.’ Yuri grinned. ‘Shall we?’

There was no ladder in the final chamber, but the closed lid above bore a hand-imprint key. Yuri boosted Stef up on his shoulders so she could work the key. As she fumbled, he grunted. ‘Get on with it, woman.’

‘Look at us. Two old idiots, exploring interstellar space.’

‘But we’re here.’

‘That we are.’

At last the lid swung back. There was a faint pop of equalising pressure. They found themselves looking up at a blue, apparently harmless sky – and the air that rushed in, full of odd smells, was maybe a bit thin and cold, but healthy, oxygen-rich air, undoubtedly. Yuri deliberately kept breathing. They had no stored oxygen; there was no point holding their breath. But he felt no ill effects.

Stef clambered out of the pit, then reached down to help Yuri scramble up. Once again they had some trouble. It was a comedy, Yuri thought, two old stiffs climbing out of a hole in the ground. At last he was out, and they looked at each other, laughed.

Then they stood together and faced a new world.

They were on high ground here, which sloped away to a plain streaked with purple and white, on which stood a scatter of slim orange cones, vegetation perhaps. To the right the ground rose up to a rocky massif – no, it was too regular to be natural, Yuri realised slowly. It was some kind of tremendous building, a sloping face with deep grooved inlets. On the horizon he saw more mountains, mist-shrouded, that again looked suspiciously regular, like tremendous pyramids.

A sun dominated the sky, huge, hanging low, its face pocked with dark spots.

‘Wow,’ said Stef simply.

Yuri dug out his elderly ISF-issue slate, which had a wireless link to the ColU’s processor box, in his chest pack. ‘Can you see all this, old buddy?’

A single green light sparked on the slate.

‘So, any idea where we are?’

‘None at all,’ Stef said. She pointed at the main sun. ‘That looks like another Proxima, another M dwarf. But the Galaxy is full of M dwarfs. We could be anywhere . . .’

A huge shadow swept over the ground to their left. Yuri looked up.

‘I guess we should start walking,’ Stef said, still staring ahead. She hadn’t noticed the shadow, evidently. ‘If we manage to see any stars we might reconstruct a constellation pattern, figure out where we are. I have the 3D positions of the nearby stars loaded on my slate.’

‘Or,’ Yuri said, ‘we could just ask.’ He pointed upwards.

At last she turned to see.

Over their heads, a craft was descending, coming in to land.

It was like a tremendous airship. It moved smoothly, silently. It bore a symbol on its outer envelope, crossed axes with a Christian cross in the background, and lettering above:

S P Q R

Anchors of some kind were dropped from a fancy-looking gondola. When the craft had drifted to a halt a rope ladder unrolled to the ground. And as they watched, astonished, a hatch opened, and a man clambered down the ladder.

As soon as he reached the ground the man started towards them. He wore a plumed helmet, and a scarlet cloak over what looked like a bearskin tunic. His lower legs were bare, above strapped-up boots. He had a sword on one hip, and a gaudy-looking handgun in a holster on the other.

Yuri called, ‘Who the hell are you?’

The man, striding steadily, started shouting back: ‘Fortasse accipio oratio stridens vestri. Sum Quintus Fabius, centurio navis stellae “Malleus Jesu”. Quid estis, quid agitis in hac provincia? Et quid est mixti lingua vestri? Germanicus est? Non dubito quin vos ex Germaniae Exteriorae. Cognovi de genus vestri prius. Bene? Quam respondebitis mihi?

Always another door, Yuri thought. ‘Let me handle this.’ He spread his hands and walked forward, towards the angry stranger.

In the hearts of a hundred billion worlds –

Across a trillion dying realities in a lethal multiverse –

In the chthonic silence –

There was satisfaction. The network of mind continued to push out in space, from the older stars, the burned-out worlds, to the young, out across the Galaxy. Pushed deep in time too, twisting the fate of countless trillions of lives.

But time was short, and ever shorter.

In the Dream of the End Time, there was a note of urgency.

AFTERWORD

This novel is about life on an ‘exoplanet’, a planet beyond the solar system. The first such planet orbiting a normal star (as opposed to a pulsar) was discovered as recently as 1995. At time of writing we have discovered thousands of such worlds (for a recent survey see Ray Jayawardhana, Strange New Worlds, Princeton, 2011). The first discovery of a planet in the Alpha Centauri star system was announced in October 2012 (see ‘An Earth Mass Planet Orbiting Alpha Centauri B’ by Xavier Dumusque et al., Nature, 17 October 2012).