At the other end of the tunnel, Peacekeepers waited for them, in containment suits, heavily armed.

For Yuri and Tollemache, it took four days, of showers, heat baths, body fluid samples, full-body scans, tasteless meals, interrogations of various kinds, and periods of uneasy sleep, before the doctors finally slipped off their surgical masks and shook their hands. ‘It’s been a unique experience, gentlemen. Thank you.’

‘Kiss my ass,’ said Tollemache. ‘Where are my pants?’

As it turned out their clothes were not returned to them. For one thing the colonists’ scraps of stem-bark cloth were the first samples of Arduan life solar-system-based scientists had got their hands on directly, since the sparse samples returned by the Ad Astra years earlier. There were even anthropologists on hand, Yuri learned, eager to pore over the handicrafts of the emergent human communities of Proxima c.

Tollemache was given a fresh Peacekeeper uniform. Yuri noticed it was beefier than the old design, with toughened pads at shoulders, neck, elbows, knees, and a kind of utility belt with pouches and loops, ready for weapons. Evidently Peacekeeping in the modern solar system was a more dangerous game than it used to be. For his part, Yuri was handed an orange jumpsuit just like the kind he’d been issued with when he was first pulled out of the cryo tank on Mars. Some things didn’t change.

They were brought to a kind of lounge, with padded couches, a bar serving soft drinks and coffee, and a big picture window with a view of the battered surface of Mercury, shaded from the sun. Here at last they were reunited with Mardina and Beth, and Colonel Kalinski. Mardina was already devouring coffee, picking up where she’d left off at the Hub base on Per Ardua. She wore a smart astronaut uniform, black and silver. Beth, though, was in an orange jumpsuit like her father’s.

Beth hugged Yuri. But they pulled apart, uncertain, dressed up in strange clothes, even smelling wrong. Yuri forced a smile, uncertainly.

Yuri helped himself to a soda. It bubbled oddly in the low gravity; he’d never had a soda on Mars. ‘So, twenty-eight years after waking up on Mars—’

‘Thirty-two,’ Kalinski murmured. ‘You jumped another four years in the Hatch, remember.’

‘Shit. Here I am back in a jumpsuit, like a convict.’

Beth came over and linked his arm. ‘Never mind, Dad. I’m a convict too.’

‘Yeah. The difference is the uniform looks good on you.’

‘And I still have this.’ She stroked the tattoo that covered half her face. ‘They couldn’t scrub that off in their decon. But, you know, they offered to remove it for me there and then. Said I’d fit in better.’

‘You’d “fit in”. Where?’

‘Earth,’ Mardina said bluntly.

Beth stroked her tattoo again. ‘I’m not from Earth. I’m from Per Ardua.’

‘Quite right, honey,’ and Yuri kissed her on the cheek. ‘We’ll work it out somehow.’ He looked at Mardina in her ISF suit. ‘I’m surprised you let them dress you up in that thing. The ISF dumped you on Per Ardua.’

She looked at him steadily. ‘But I wasn’t born on Per Ardua. This was my career, Yuri. This is who I was, and am. I’m still an officer in the ISF, I’m told. Even though they haven’t figured out what rank I am; strictly speaking I was retired with honours when I was left behind at Proxima.’

Tollemache said, ‘There’s talk of back pay. You ought to chase that up, Jones. But we probably won’t need it, we’re all going to earn a fortune out of this.’ He grinned, gulping down some kind of fruit drink. ‘What a break! I bet those assholes Brady and Keller will be sick as shit when they hear about this.’ He mused, ‘In another four years’ time, I guess. Good. Give me time to milk it before sharing it with them.’

Yuri looked at him in disgust. ‘You really are a charmer, Tollemache.’

He just laughed. ‘You got to take your chances in this life.’

‘Good point,’ said a newcomer, a man, old, short, plump, bustling into the room. ‘That Hatch of yours, Peacekeeper Tollemache, could be a chance for all of us – an opportunity crucial to the future of two stellar systems, and to the whole destiny of mankind.’ In his eighties maybe, he wore what looked like a business suit, with thin lapels, a kind of cravat, shiny fake-leather shoes. Behind him came another man, tall, grave, thin as a builder’s stem limb, in a well-cut astronaut uniform with officer stripes on his upper arm.

Kalinski stepped forward with a professional smile. ‘Good to see you, sir. I need to introduce you. This is Sir Michael King—’

This was the tubby businessman type. He winked at Kalinski. ‘Stef, your twin sends her regards.’ Then he strode forward and shook all their hands; his grip was surprisingly firm, a worker’s handshake. ‘I’m president and CEO of Universal Engineering, Inc., the prime contractor with responsibility for developing the resources of Mercury on behalf of the nations and peoples of the UN.’ He studied Yuri. ‘You’re the fella from the ice, right? Rip Van Winkle. What do you call yourself – Yuri Eden? Well, I’m the guy whose company built the ship that took you to Mars, and the Ad Astra that delivered you all the way to Proxima Centauri. What do you think of that?’

‘Thanks,’ Yuri said drily.

‘And I just drove in from Mars on a hulk ship myself, once I heard the news about you people. This is my closest colleague on Mercury,’ King said, indicating the tall man in the astronaut suit.

‘Jim Laughlin, Colonel, ISF.’ He shook hands in his turn. ‘Base commander, here in Caloris. You can see I’m an ISF officer, but I have a political reporting chain into the UN itself, ultimately to the Security Council.’

‘My teammate,’ King said. He threw mock boxing punches at Laughlin. ‘Or my sparring partner. We get on famously.’

Laughlin raised his eyebrows; evidently long-suffering, he said nothing.

King said, ‘Come. Sit. Have some more drinks. Colonel Kalinski, will you sort that out? You need something to eat?’

‘They’ve been feeding us in the decon,’ Mardina said.

‘What, barium meals? Ha ha. Look, I know it’s tough, we appreciate all you’ve been through.’

Beth accepted a glass of water from Kalinski. ‘Sir Michael King?’

‘Yes?’

‘What do you want?’

Mardina burst out laughing. Even Laughlin suppressed an icy grin, Yuri saw.

King evidently had a sense of humour. He grinned, sat on a couch and faced the group. ‘Good question, young lady. Well, together with my colleague here, we run this place. We make the decisions that count. OK? We both have puppet-masters back on Earth, so does everybody, but here on the ground, we make the decisions. And at the end of the day we will have to make decisions—’

‘About us,’ said Tollemache.

‘About the consequences of your emergence through the Hatch,’ Laughlin said carefully, ‘and it was a shock as much for us as for you. It’s only been days. We’re still trying to digest the implications. Political, economic, social, technological, scientific. Although I have to say this kind of possibility, that the Hatches are some sort of transit system, was sketched in one of Colonel Kalinski’s papers.’

‘Actually the paper was by my twin,’ Stef Kalinski said stiffly.

‘That has been some help. I’m sure Colonel Kalinski here will tell you all about the spectacular scientific possibilities.’

King put in, ‘But big cosmic questions are rather beyond my horizon, and that of my own political masters – and indeed the UEI shareholders. The first reaction from on high, and my comms systems have been buzzing since you arrived in this regard, concerns the potential utility of the thing. If, you see, we can walk through this – this lightspeed tunnel – from one star system to the next, think how we could use it. When we built and launched the Ad Astra, it strained the resources of the UN itself. We were determined to use our kernel technology to plant seeds on the habitable planet of Proxima before the Chinese could reach it. Well, we did it, but we exhausted ourselves. As for the Chinese, they couldn’t do it at all. Oh, they could probably send out some kind of slowboat, a big solar-sail junk. Take them decades to get there. Centuries even. Because, my friends, they don’t have access to what remains an exclusively UN resource: that is, the kernel mines here on Mercury, where we dug up the magical bits of physics that shot your ship off to the stars.’