‘Just so long as they don’t try predating on me,’ Beth murmured.

Rain fell.

Just like that. There was no sense of a start or a finish to the storm; it just descended, all at once, sheets of water piling down vertically between the trees, or dripping from foliage that seemed to be of no use in shielding the party.

They were all soaked immediately. And when the water started running over the ground, the vehicles had to slither to a stop. They found what shelter they could, under the trees, huddled against the ColU. Beth put her arm around Mardina. Yuri held up his face to the rain, hoping for some relief from the heat, but the water itself was warm, and faintly briny when it worked into his mouth, perhaps evaporated from some salty inland sea.

There was a tremendous crack of thunder, a flash of lightning that seemed to light up the whole forest.

Then the rain stopped, as suddenly as it had started. Still, however, the water dripped from the trees in a shower on their backs and heads. The light got a bit brighter, but there was no direct sunlight, no break in the cloud layer.

And Mattock was groaning.

Yuri looked back. The Peacekeeper, with his soaked uniform open to the waist, was doubled over in the mud, gasping, like he was drowning. Liu and Delga were trying to grab hold of him, to get him on his back.

Mardina slapped the hull of the ColU. ‘He’s sick. Do your stuff.’

The ColU lumbered around, sending up a spray of watery mud and leaf matter, and rolled back. With a combined effort of all five of them – ‘One, two, three!’ – they lifted Mattock off the ground and onto the ColU’s carapace. They laid him out, tucking spare clothing under his head, while the ColU’s fine manipulator arms took his pulse, checked his airways, took his temperature with a fine probe in the mouth. Then an equipment bay in the ColU’s flank opened up and a drip feed snaked into his upper arm.

Liu asked, ‘So what’s wrong with him, autodoc?’

‘The heat,’ Delga snarled. ‘What do you think?’

‘That’s true,’ the ColU said. ‘I believe he may have had a mild heart attack. He needs proper treatment – his temperature needs to be reduced quickly—’

Yuri said, ‘But we’re stuck here. The ground is a pond after that storm. If we try to move, even if we back out of here, we’ll end up smashing into a tree.’

Beth watched all this. ‘We need help, then,’ she said. She walked a few paces into the forest, the mud splashing her bare legs. ‘The game’s over!’ she shouted. Her voice echoed in the forest, and somewhere there was a bird-like fluttering as a startled kite flew away. ‘You blokes in the IFS!’

‘ISF,’ her mother murmured gently.

‘Whatever. We know you’re watching us. Well, you can see how we’re fixed. Mr Mattock is going to die unless you help him. So come on. No more of these stupid games you people play. Come on out, ready or not. Why, he even put on his nice blue uniform just for you—’

And there was a crash of foliage, lights that glared bright. A truck – no, a kind of armoured car, Yuri thought, like a beefed-up Mars rover – came barrelling out of the heart of the jungle. It was basically a camouflage drab green, but it had mud-splashed logos, of the UN, the ISF, even the name of the Ad Astra carefully lettered on its side. And Yuri saw goggled eyes peering at him from out of a slit window.

CHAPTER 54

The rover skidded to a halt, just feet away from the ColU, sending up a mud spray. Beth flinched back, hiding behind Yuri. He reflected that, Ardua-born, she’d never seen a vehicle travel so fast.

‘ISF,’ said the ColU.

‘ISF,’ said Yuri.

‘Told you so,’ said Mardina.

The ColU said, ‘I have misled you. After all this time . . . but not intentionally. I did not know they were here.’

‘They lied to you, just as much as to us,’ said Yuri.

The ColU went ominously silent.

‘Later, ColU,’ Mardina said. ‘Don’t go crashing on us now.’

A heavy door opened with a hiss of hydraulics. The man that emerged looked overdressed to Yuri, given the heat, in a heavy coat and trousers in the drab green shades of Per Ardua, and he carried another thick jacket. He had a weapon at his waist, Yuri saw, a vicious-looking handgun, clearly visible. He faced the group, who stood around the suffering Mattock on the ColU. He looked seventy, at least. Under a blue Peacekeeper’s beret, greying hair was plastered down by sweat.

Yuri knew who this was. ‘Peacekeeper Tollemache,’ he said, wondering. Decades older, heavier, but undoubtedly him. ‘I thought I’d enjoyed your company enough on the ship.’

Tollemache sneered. ‘Shame you still haven’t got the bruises I gave you, you little shit. I can’t say I’m glad to see you again. Or any of you losers. Good Christ, look at you, you’re a pack of scarecrows.’

Delga laughed at him. ‘Remember me, Tollemache? You owe me money.’

‘Fuck off. Which of you bastards is the sick bastard?’

Mardina glared. ‘Which do you think?’

Tollemache stomped over to the ColU, glanced over Mattock, and placed his spare coat over him. ‘Get that drip out of his arm. We’ll get him into the truck and back to the base.’

They got organised. There was a stretcher in the rover, quickly unfolded, and under Tollemache’s brusque directions they prepared to lift Mattock into the rover’s interior. The migrants had to do it themselves; Tollemache stood by, and nobody else came out of the rover to give a hand.

The rover’s interior was brightly lit and smelled of disinfectant. Yuri could see there was a driver in a sealed cabin upfront, beyond a thick window. Beth looked around the vehicle in wide-eyed wonderment. Mardina’s look was more complex. Resentful, perhaps. Anger building. Struggling with the Peacekeeper’s heavy body in this clean technological space, Yuri felt grimy, out of place.

‘I don’t get putting a coat on top of him,’ Liu admitted. ‘Won’t that just make him hotter?’

‘I’ve seen this design before,’ Mardina said. ‘Tollemache’s wearing the same. There’s frozen ice in there, inside insulated layers.’

‘And built-in cryo circuits,’ Tollemache said. ‘They left us ready for the heat here. They gave us the right kind of diet to cope, extra vitamin C, low calories, low protein, high carbs . . . They monitor us, I mean the autodocs, they take our temperatures all the time.’

‘With a probe up your ass,’ Delga said. ‘I do hope they stuck a probe permanently up your ass.’

Tollemache ignored her. ‘Anyway it’s been easy since this star winter, as you call it, cut in. Not like before.’

Yuri said, ‘ “As we call it.” You hear everything we say, do you?’

‘The AIs listen in, and filter. Don’t flatter yourself, shithead. You’re not that important.’

‘I knew it,’ Mardina said, her voice thickening with anger. ‘I knew it, all these years. I told you, Yuri.’

‘Yeah. But they never came out of their box to help you, did they?’

Tollemache pointed. ‘Get him strapped down on that couch. There won’t be room for you all to ride. Two of you, with him. The rest will walk with me. If you can keep up.’

Mardina and Beth got into the back of the rover. The door flaps closed up seamlessly, and the rover rolled back, did a brisk turn, and pushed away into the forest.

Tollemache faced them, Yuri, Delga, Liu. He pointed the way the rover had gone. ‘Follow the rover. I’ll follow you. I don’t trust any of you.’

Delga just laughed at him. She walked away with Liu.

Yuri said, ‘Our ColU—’

‘It can follow us. And the one you wrecked.’

‘It wasn’t us – ah, the hell with it.’

As they walked, Yuri was soon immersed once more in enclosing, withering heat, and he hoped it really wasn’t far to this base of Tollemache’s. Tollemache himself walked boldly enough, but Yuri wondered how much good his ice-laden suit and all the rest actually did him.