‘No. Lieutenant Jones. Who you saw stranded on this dump of a world at gunpoint. Similar to how you ended up here, I imagine. Stand down,’ she repeated more sternly.
Mattock sighed, lowered his rifle, thumbed a safety. ‘All right. Welcome to Mattockville. You’d better follow me.’ He walked off, limping.
The ColU excused itself and went rolling away to inspect the mysterious Arduan greenery. Its manipulator arms seemed to twitch with the excitement of sampling yet another alien-life mystery, Yuri thought.
Yuri trotted up to walk beside Mattock. ‘Hey, Peacekeeper. Do you really call it Mattockville?’
‘No.’
In the little homestead there were just three low dome-shaped shacks, set around a central area where a fire burned fitfully in the open air.
People came out to see the newcomers, wary, cautious, the children wide-eyed at seeing new faces maybe for the first time in their lives. Yuri counted six adults, all white. They wore the usual remains of ISF-issue clothing, but defied the cold by padding their jumpsuits and overcoats with dried-out stem bark, so they looked like stuffed scarecrows as they waddled around. The little kids were especially comical, and they made Beth laugh.
Mattock showed them to one of the domed dwellings. It was just a frame of stems lashed together somehow, covered over with a layer of blankets and then heaps of Arduan vegetable matter, presumably taken from the ground-covering plants. The visitors went on in, ahead of Mattock. The dome was empty of people. There were pallets and chests, and bundles of clothes stuffed beneath the walls. A hearth smoked, but no fire was lit. Yuri spotted a heap of dirty ship’s-issue crockery, but there seemed no place to cook in here; maybe that was done in another dome.
Mardina said, ‘So this is what you can build if you don’t have to move every couple of years.’
Yuri shrugged. ‘We’d have done better.’
Mattock came after them into the crowded dome, followed by more adults, a woman, two men, who looked at the newcomers with a kind of nervous hostility.
Mardina tugged open her coat. ‘Warm around here, even without the fire.’
‘Yes,’ said Delga. ‘Thought as much even outside. Even without the fire. What’s the game, Mattock? Sitting on top of a volcano?’
He said gruffly, ‘You want tea?’
Delga grinned. ‘If you’ve got any crew-issue coffee left I’ll take some of that.’
‘Not here,’ he grumbled.
‘Then don’t bother. Oh, here.’ Delga dug into her backpack and produced a bottle.
Mattock took it cautiously. ‘What the hell’s this?’
Mardina said, ‘Klein vodka, we call it. From potatoes. Take it easy if you’ve not been used to it. A neighbourly offering.’
‘We’d like the bottle back when it’s empty,’ Yuri said.
‘Hmph. Once I would have arrested the likes of you for carrying around illicit alcohol.’
Delga grinned. ‘Sure you would, and then drunk it yourself.’
Mardina said wearily, ‘Stow it, Delga. Look, Peacekeeper – why don’t you introduce us?’
Mattock did so with poor grace. ‘Bill Maven, Andrei Allen, Nancy Stiles. Sit down, for Christ’s sake.’
They sat on the floor, or on rickety chairs, trunks.
Mardina introduced her group in turn. ‘You’re all passengers, right? Except for you, Mattock.’
‘I remember your face,’ Yuri said to Andrei Allen. ‘From the ship.’
Allen shrugged indifferently.
‘I remember you,’ Nancy Stiles said to Mardina.
Mardina answered cautiously, ‘Oh, yes?’
‘You never did me any harm, even if you were an astronaut. And anyhow, you’re not an astronaut any longer, are you? Not since they cast you down here with us. Any more than Tom Mattock here is a Peacekeeper, even if he does put on the uniform when he thinks strangers are going to show up.’
Delga laughed. ‘Really, Tom?’
‘You’re the first that ever has, though, since the split.’
Yuri wondered: the split?
Mardina said, ‘I’m guessing you didn’t volunteer to stay down here, Mattock.’
‘Nah. In this drop group there was a fatality on the way down, I mean in the shuttle itself. Heart attack, out of the blue, triggered by the deceleration. One of the men. I was the closest genetic match, according to the bastards who worked out those things on the Ad Astra. So I had to stay. Just like you, Lieutenant.’
Delga laughed again. ‘Stories like that make my own shit life worthwhile. You always were a butthole, Mattock, and you got what you deserved.’
Mattock scowled back. ‘How many in your group?’
‘About fifty,’ Mardina said. ‘A good number of children, some of them nearly grown – well, you saw one outside, my daughter.’
‘Our daughter,’ Yuri said gently.
‘Fifty. Jesus.’
‘And you,’ Yuri said, ‘are, what, six adults?’
Delga asked, ‘So what happened to the other eight, Tom? Murder them in their beds, did you?’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Andrei said. ‘They went their way, we went ours.’
Mardina frowned. ‘They?’
‘We’re white. They weren’t. All sorts of shades, but none of ’em like us. Didn’t want them fathering our kids . . . We didn’t do them any harm. They went their way, we went ours,’ he said again.
‘That was the split you talked about,’ Yuri said.
Mattock just nodded.
They had come across this before. Many of the already tiny parties the Ad Astra shuttle had brought down seemed to have splintered further, separating out by race, usually, or sometimes by religion, or sexual orientation.
‘Well,’ Delga said gleefully, ‘we’re all sorts, in our fifty. And our kids are a mixture too. What do you call your Beth, Mardina? A muda-muda. A half-caste. That’s us. Just a big bunch of mixed-up muda-mudas.’ She laughed again, showing her teeth. ‘We’re going to get along just fine with you white boys.’
‘Don’t pay her any attention,’ Yuri said. ‘She likes stirring up trouble. We’ll get by.’
‘Oh no, we won’t,’ snapped Mattock. ‘You people can just keep right on moving. Pass through our land if you want, but you ain’t stopping here.’
‘ “Our land”?’ Delga murmured menacingly.
Andrei Allen leaned forward. ‘We found this place. We came trekking down the river just like you . . .’
‘Good God,’ Mardina murmured. ‘Did nobody stay where McGregor put them?’
‘We were trying to get away from the cold, the winter. And we found this place, and it stayed that bit warmer—’
‘How come?’ Mardina asked.
Delga shook her head. ‘These hayseeds don’t know, astronaut. No use asking.’
‘We planted our crops and we built our homes and we raised our kids, and we’re not going anywhere,’ Allen said.
‘And we’re not sharing,’ Mattock said fiercely.
Mardina stayed calm. ‘There are fifty of us, Tom, and a half-dozen of you. I reckon that if we decide to stick around here you won’t have much choice about it.’
Delga laughed again. ‘Might is right, huh, Peacekeeper?’
Mattock glared back, red-faced. He’d been a bully on the ship, Yuri remembered, and was no doubt a bully in this little community now, lording it over his fellow colonists. A bully who was now being defied. Yuri was aware that he still had his rifle.
Just at that moment of tension Beth stuck her head in the door. ‘I know,’ she said brightly.
Mardina asked warily, ‘You know what?’
‘Why it’s warmer here, in this place. I heard you arguing.’
‘We weren’t arguing—’
‘The ColU worked it out. Come and see!’
The ColU rolled cautiously across the land colonised by the Arduan-green sheets, sticking to open ground. ‘It’s typical of Arduan life,’ it said. ‘These ground-covering “plants” aren’t plants at all. They’re kites!’
Beth, Yuri and Mardina followed, treading carefully. They had come maybe half a kilometre from the domes of Mattock’s settlement. From here they had a clear view of the river confluence, the two valleys snaking off to the south. And they were surrounded by alien life.