Liu, moving cautiously himself – evidently it hadn’t been just his face that had taken the beating – took Yuri to that outer staircase, steps fixed to the curving wall with a safety rail, and led him up.
At least, just like on Mars, Yuri didn’t find the stuff here hard. Since his first waking, he’d found twenty-second-century technology easy to work. User interfaces seemed to have settled down to common standards some time before he’d been frozen. Even the language had stabilised, more or less, if not the accents; English was spoken across several worlds now and had to stay comprehensible to everybody, and there was a huge mass of recorded culture, all of which tended to keep the language static. The vehicles and vocabularies of the year 2166 were easy. It was the people he couldn’t figure out. And now Yuri climbed through a blizzard of faces, none of them familiar.
He looked for a window. He still had no idea where on Earth he was. And why the enclosure? Maybe he was in some mid-latitude climate refuge; he’d heard that since his day the whole middle belt of the Earth had heated up, dried out and been abandoned. He could be anywhere. But that steady pull of gravity was reassuring, even as he laboured up the stairs with his Mars-softened muscles. He wondered when his first physio was going to be.
They reached a space enclosed by movable partition panels, with fold-out chairs set in rows like a lecture theatre. Some guy in a uniform of black and silver stood at the front, facing away from the dozen or so people in the room, talking through a series of images, star fields and space satellites.
A woman in a similar uniform, standing at the door with a slate, stopped Liu and Yuri as they entered. Yuri read her name tag: ISF LT MARDINA JONES. Maybe thirty, she was very dark, with tightly curled black hair. ‘You’re late,’ she said.
‘Sorry. Just out of medical.’ Liu gave their names.
‘Name tags?’
Liu dug his out of a pocket and showed it to her; she scanned it with her slate. She turned to Yuri. ‘You?’
Yuri just shrugged.
Liu said, ‘Like I said, just out of medical.’
‘Just awake, huh.’ Jones shook her head and made a note on her slate. ‘Typical. Make sure you sort it out later.’ She had a thick Australian accent. ‘Sit, you’re late.’
Finding a seat in the semi-darkened little theatre turned out to be a problem. Three guys sat together on a row of a dozen otherwise empty seats. When Yuri went to sit down in the row Liu prodded him in the back. ‘Move on,’ he whispered.
Yuri had been quick to anger ever since he’d first woken up on Mars. ‘Why should I?’
‘Because that middle guy is Gustave Klein. Wait until you’re beefed up before you take him on.’
But it was already too late, Yuri realised. Klein was white, maybe fifty years old, hefty if not overweight, head elaborately shaven. His fists, resting on his knees, were like steam hammers. And Yuri had made eye contact with him. He barely noticed the two guys with Klein, typical attack dogs. Klein leered at Liu, taking in his injuries, and looked away, dismissive.
They moved on, cautious in the dark. ‘What’s so special about him?’
‘He was the best Sabatier-furnace engineer in his colony,’ Liu whispered. ‘That’s part of the recycling system – you know that, right? And he fixed it so that nobody else could touch those systems. He was a damn water king. No wonder they shipped him out. And it looks like he’s fixing to get the same hold here.’
‘A water king.’ Yuri grinned. ‘Until it rains, right?’
Liu looked at him strangely.
Somebody hissed. ‘Yuri! Hey, Yuri! Over here!’ A skinny, shambling form hustled along a row, clearing two spaces, to muttered complaints from the people behind.
‘Lemmy?’ It was the first familiar voice he’d heard since waking in the can. Yuri sat beside him, followed by Liu.
‘Awake at last, huh?’ Lemmy’s whisper was soft, practised. ‘That bastard Tollemache really shot you up, didn’t he? Well, he got what he deserved.’
Yuri tried to figure it out. Lemmy Pink, nineteen years old, had been the nearest thing to a friend Yuri had made on Mars. Even if Lemmy was only looking for protection.
The last Yuri remembered of Mars was that he and Lemmy had busted out of their dome. Yuri had had to get out. Every atom in his body longed to be out there on the Martian ground, frozen, ultraviolet-blasted desert though it might be. He’d been taken through spacesuit and airlock drills for the sake of emergency training, but he’d never been outside. Mostly he never even got to look through a window. So they’d stolen a rover, made a run for the hills, a local feature called the Chaos – flipped the truck, been picked up by the Peacekeepers. He remembered Tollemache. You’re the ice boy, right? Nothing but a pain in the butt since they defrosted you. Well, you won’t be my problem much longer. And with a gloved fist he had jammed a needle into Yuri’s neck, and the red-brown Martian light had folded away . . .
And he’d woken up in this tank.
‘What do you mean, he got what he deserved?’
‘He’s here too. In the hull. Ha! He got what was coming to him, all right. But it was because he didn’t stop us pinching that rover in the first place, rather than what he did to you.’
Yuri mock-punched his arm. ‘Good to see they brought you home too, man.’
Lemmy flinched back. ‘Don’t touch me. I’m full of the fucking sniffles that are going around this coffin, typical of me to get them all.’
‘What about Krafft?’ Lemmy’s pet rat, back in the dome.
Lemmy’s face fell. ‘Well, they took him off me. What would you expect?’
‘I’m sorry.’
They were disturbing the astronaut type giving his lecture. Mardina Jones was right behind them, her voice a severe murmur. ‘If you two buttheads don’t shut up and listen to Major McGregor I’ll put you on a charge.’
They shut up. But when she withdrew, Lemmy was staring at Yuri, in the shadowy dark. ‘What was that you just said?’
‘What? About the rat?’
‘No. Something about them bringing us home.’
‘I don’t know, man. I don’t know if I’m asleep or awake.’ But Lemmy kept staring at him.
Yuri, disoriented, confused, distracted by the noise of the crowds just half a metre beyond the partition, looked up at the astronaut at the lectern in his glittering black-as-night uniform. On Mars everybody had hated the astronauts, because they were rotated, they got to go home. Yuri tried to concentrate on what he was saying.
‘Even a single pixel from these very early images of the new world told the astronomers a great deal. Spectral analysis revealed an atmosphere with free oxygen, methane, nitrous oxide.’
Major McGregor, maybe late twenties, was tall, upright, whip-thin but athletic, with a healthy glow to his cheeks in the light of the images he showed. He had a slick Angleterre accent, and his hair, blond, brushed, oiled, looked like it got more care than most of the people in this facility.
‘Oxygen, think of that! Suddenly we had a habitable world, right on our doorstep. All of you have had experience of the colonies on Mars and the moon – bleak, inhospitable worlds, and yet the best the solar system has to offer. And now, suddenly, this.
‘With time, variations of brightness and spectral content told us something about the distribution of continents and oceans. More subtle variations had to reflect changing weather. Not only that, the presence of oxygen is a strong indicator of life, I mean native life, because something has to be putting all that oxygen in the air.’ He displayed graphs, wriggling lines. ‘This prominent feature in the red part of the spectrum indicated the presence of something like our own chlorophyll, some kind of light-harvesting pigment. All deduced from watching a single point of light . . .’
Yuri had no idea what he was talking about. But he had spent a great deal of his time since being woken on Mars not knowing what the hell was going on around him, and it didn’t seem to make any material difference.