Brady frowned. ‘What’s he talking about?’

And Yuri told them about the hatch.

CHAPTER 56

They rested for a couple of hours. They ate more ISF food.

They took showers, their first since being bundled out of the Ad Astra all those years ago. Mardina seemed to love it. Yuri couldn’t stand the stink of the soap. Beth hated it, evidently, hated being in this box of metal and fake light. Yuri felt a twinge of sadness that she’d probably never learn to enjoy the Earthside advanced-civilisation-type luxuries he and her mother had grown up with; she could never be pampered. But then she had her own pleasures, her own place, here on Per Ardua.

Then, none of them ready for sleep, they formed up a party to go and take another look at the hatch. What else could they do?

Tollemache said he would lead. Yuri guessed he wanted to compensate somehow for letting him and Liu Tao run ahead earlier, and make ‘his’ discovery for him. Yuri would go along, one of the two original discoverers, to be sure they found the way back. Mardina wanted to take a turn to go and see. And Beth was coming, Mardina was firm about that; she had seen the looks passing between these strange, obsessive old crewmen in their rusty hull in the jungle, and she wasn’t about to let her daughter out of her sight for a second.

They would take the ColU too. Yuri argued that the ColU’s translation skills with the builders could be vital; after all it was the builders that had led him and Liu to the hatch in the first place.

Tollemache accepted, but with bad grace. ‘Translation? That thing is designed to eat grass and shit out burgers, period. And the fucking woodies are just fucking woodies. What the hell has been going on with you people out there?’

Tollemache drove the party in the ISF rover, guided by Yuri, with Beth and Mardina on board. He smashed flat the undergrowth, even battering down a few mature trees, to leave a way open for the ColU which rolled complacently behind.

For Yuri, it was almost comfortable to get out of the hull and to breathe the dense, wet, warm, heavily scented air of Per Ardua again. It wasn’t as if he was at home out here, not exactly. But more so than being back in the carcass of what, for him, had been a prison ship.

At the site Tollemache parked up, and they walked into the clearing. The ColU rolled quietly after them, sensor pod extended, studying the ground.

The hatch, set in its panel in the clearing, was just as they had left it.

Tollemache wore his ice-filled outer suit once more, and he had a kind of camera unit on his shoulder and a science sensor pack in one hand, with links back to the hull base. ‘For the official record,’ he said.

Mardina snorted. ‘Or so you can claim the official credit.’

Yuri would have led the way forward, but Mardina touched his arm, prompting him to let Beth go ahead.

Beth walked alone into the brighter light of the clearing, without apparent fear. She stood over the hatch itself, staring around, gazing at the cover of the hatch with its curious trefoil-groove starburst markings. There was a breeze, hot and clammy; it ruffled her short-cut hair.

‘I have no idea what’s going on in her head,’ Yuri murmured to Mardina. ‘She’s been exposed to so much newness, all in a rush. How can she possibly take it all in? It must be knocking her world to pieces.’

‘She’s been on the road all her life,’ Mardina said. ‘It’s all been new to her. Just as it has for us. I think she’s going to be fine. And look . . .’

Almost shyly, builders were emerging from the forest fringe, around the hatch. One by one they skirted the hatch itself, and clambered with cautious pirouettes over the mounds of dirt created earlier by their rough digging-out of the hatch. Yuri counted seven, eight, nine of them. And the builders came up to Beth, spinning, shaking their stem limbs – dance-talking, in the builders’ characteristic way. Beth responded in the way she’d grown up learning instinctively, with simple steps and spins that echoed messages of friendliness and welcome.

Tollemache was recording all this. He shook his head. ‘Now I’ve seen everything.’

Yuri ignored him. ‘ColU, you got anything?’

The ColU was passing a sensor pod back and forth over the ground surface on the end of its long manipulator arm, like a heavy lure on a fishing rod. ‘There is evidence of extensive working in the surrounding area, Yuri Eden. It shows up clearly in my geophysical surveys, in a variety of ways, though invisible to the naked eye. As you see, the structure you call the “hatch” is embedded in a wider sheet of . . . a metal I cannot identify, some alloy. Ask Beth Eden Jones to stamp.’

‘What?’

‘Ask her to stamp her foot. It is a simple request.’

Yuri was baffled, but Mardina impatiently passed on the request.

Beth looked puzzled too, but she stepped out onto the grey, gleaming surface, cautious in her bark sandals. ‘It’s not slippery,’ she said, testing it by sliding her foot. ‘Although it looks sheer.’ She raised her right foot and stamped, once, twice. Then she jumped up and down, slamming her feet back down on the surface. To her delight, the builders copied her, flexing their big support stems to leap up and clatter down like wooden toys.

‘Thank you,’ the ColU murmured. ‘I now have sonic and seismic data. Yuri Eden, the hatch, and the structure in which it is embedded, is not thick. A couple of centimetres, no more. And beneath it I can detect nothing. I mean, no cavities in the ground.’

Mardina looked baffled. ‘So what does that mean? No alien treasure chamber?’ she said.

‘Evidently not.’

‘Then what is it all for?’

‘That remains to be determined . . . I told you there are extensive traces of workings in the ground here, all around the panel of which the hatch is the centrepiece, and in the ground further out. Very ancient traces, I should add. Little more than stains in the dirt, discolorations.’ The sensor pod brushed the ground, as if licking it, and returned all but invisible samples to an open flap in the ColU’s hull. ‘And I find traces of the local photosynthetic chemistry, but heavily modified.’

‘Engineered?’

‘I believe so. As if there was once an extensive sun-catcher plant here. Well, this substellar point is a logical site for such a plant, as the region receives the highest intensity of Proxima light. But there is evidence of other workings here, much more advanced. Traces of structures. Disturbances where foundations were laid. Holes that once took posts. I can infer what was built here, once. I could produce graphical reconstructions with a slate, or—’

‘Just tell us.’

‘The structures are like builder middens and storm shelters, but on a variety of scales, various detailed forms. Much more massively built. And there are other features – narrow lanes of compressed earth that must have been trackways, wide enough to allow a builder to pass. In the soil too I have found traces of advanced engineering. Compounds, chemical, metallic, some I can’t immediately identify. Also traces of radioactivity in the past, or at least of a high radiation environment. High energies, too; there are traces of heavy elements in the ground here I have seen nowhere else on the planet. All of this has a triple-symmetry layout which—’

‘Builders,’ Mardina said. ‘I don’t get it. We’ve seen the builders, all the way back to the shuttle landing site. We’ve watched them. They use tools, they manage their projects. They moved the damn jilla halfway across the planet. But they only have stone tools. They use bits of their own bodies to build dams. They’re more like beavers than human engineers . . . Aren’t they?’

The ColU said, ‘This working was more elaborate and on a much grander scale than anything we’ve seen of their activities before. And much more advanced, of course. But the signature of the builder body form is everywhere.’