‘But you will see,’ Laughlin said, ‘that the Hatch tunnel, if it can be proven to be safe, stable and so forth—’

‘And if it’s two-way,’ Kalinski said drily.

‘The Hatch is a way to achieve the mass colonisation of the Proxima system much more rapidly.’

Mardina stared. ‘You can’t be serious.’

King grinned. ‘Never more so. All we have to do is ship ’em to Mercury, push ’em through the Hatch, and they’re in business.’

Kalinski shook her head. ‘But, Sir Michael – it’s just like the way you’ve been using the kernels since they were discovered. We don’t know how these things work. We don’t know what they’re for. And yet we’re digging them up and sticking them on the back of crewed spaceships. Now you have the Hatch, and it’s an obvious artefact of intelligence, but again we don’t know who put it there and what it’s for, let alone how it functions. Can’t you see we’re on the edge of some tremendous mystery here? A mystery into which mankind seems to be walking step by step, blindfold.’

A mystery – or a trap, Yuri wondered.

King seemed to take no notice of what Kalinski had said. ‘This, of course, only increases the political tensions surrounding Mercury itself. Suddenly this scrubby planet is even more valuable than before, when it was merely the exclusive source of the kernels. Now that it’s the gateway to Prox c too, Mercury will become the solar system’s prize asset beyond Earth itself, perhaps. That will lead to stresses which—’

Beth flared. ‘But Per Ardua isn’t some pawn in a game. Per Ardua – and that’s its name, by the way, not Prox c – is a world, with a history of its own, and native life, an ecology, even intelligent life.’

Laughlin murmured, ‘Good vocabulary. You’re evidently well educated, Ms Eden Jones. Your parents are to be congratulated.’

Beth just glared at him.

‘There’s even a human history,’ Tollemache said now, with relish. ‘Nearly thirty years of colonisation. Tales of abandonment, rape, murder and incest that would make your hair curl, gentlemen. And I watched it all.’

King ignored that, and waved away Beth’s point too. ‘We already encountered life on Mars, Titan, other places. We know how to handle it.’

Yuri goggled. ‘ “Handle” it? As I recall from my time there, you’re blowing Mars up to terraform it. How is that “handling” the local life?’

‘That’s the Chinese, not us,’ King pointed out. ‘I’m sure we’ll be more careful. There could be parks, for instance. Preserves.’ He leaned forward. ‘In fact, you make a good point, Mr Eden, about the Chinese and their terraforming. We can say that’s why we don’t want to let them loose on Padre, uh . . .’

‘Per Ardua.’

‘Right. With their aquifer-breaking nuclear bombs. We need to get there first, and preserve it from those rapacious Chinese. We can fix up the language. And you four – and especially you, Ms Eden Jones – will be able to help us do just that.’

Yuri marvelled at the man’s flexibility of mind. He had to be making all this up on the spot, given how recent their irruption from the Hatch had been. Yet here he was spinning geopolitical strategies on the fly. There hadn’t been much opportunity for politicians to flourish on Per Ardua, or even in the UN enclosures on Mars, and Yuri couldn’t remember much of the Earth of his youth. King was in his element, evidently. Maybe he was the Gustave Klein of the inner system.

But Beth seemed baffled, perhaps alarmed.

Mardina took her daughter’s hand. ‘What do you mean, Beth’s going to help you? How?’

King glanced around at the clean, expansive lounge. ‘Believe me, it’s an oasis of calm in here. Out there it’s a shit storm, and it won’t pass for – oh, days. Until the next scandal comes along. And just now you four are hot properties. Especially you, Beth Eden Jones. Look at you, young, gorgeous, exotic – I’m loving that tattoo – and the first star child to return to the solar system.’

‘ “Star child”?’

‘Not my headline. We’ll get you back to Earth as soon as we can. There’ll be book offers, movie deals, a scramble for your image rights – you’re probably all over the media already, impersonated by clumsy AI avatars. You will be the human face of Prox c – I mean of Per Ardua. In the end, you may save it, single-handedly. If we handle it right.

‘The rest of you too,’ he said to the others, noticing Tollemache’s crestfallen expression, ‘will have opportunities. We just have to find the right angle. “My lonely vigil under Proxima’s red light” for you, Peacekeeper, something like that.’

‘Well, Proxima’s not red—’

‘I know a few people. And of course, you can resume your ISF career, Lieutenant Jones.’

Mardina asked, ‘Are they serious about having me back, Colonel Laughlin? For genuine duties, not as some kind of poster figure.’

‘I believe so. I can pass your request up the chain of command if that is your choice.’

King nodded, his heavy jowls compressing. ‘I’ll do my best to move that along too.’

Yuri realised that King and Laughlin weren’t meeting his eyes. ‘And me, Sir Michael? How will you take care of me?’

Beth looked shocked. As usual she immediately picked up on the implications of his tone. ‘Dad, what are you talking about? I’m not going to Earth if you’re not coming too.’

Mardina stroked her daughter’s hair. ‘Earth is our home, when all’s said and done, sweetheart.’

‘Yours, maybe,’ Yuri said. ‘But not mine. I’m a century out of time, remember?’

‘What does that matter, Dad? I was born on another planet altogether. On a world of another star! As long as we’re all together, and we’re free – that’s where home is.’

Laughlin coughed. ‘I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Not in the case of Mr Eden . . .’

‘I knew it,’ Yuri said.

‘The retrospective trials of the Heroic Generation, of which your parents were such prominent members, are continuing. Even after a century or more. And an increasingly assumed legal stance is the inheritance of punishment. That is, the right to punish heirs for the crimes of their parents or grandparents—’

Tollemache growled, ‘I hate the little shit, but even I can see that that’s unjust.’

King spread his hands. ‘It’s the mood of the times, Peacekeeper. Some of those heirs got very rich on the backs of their parents’ global crimes. This is the prosecution argument, you understand, not my own position necessarily. Why, because of gen-eng and illegal psych downloads and the like, it’s suspected that some of those heirs are members of the Heroic Generation, effectively. So you can see—’

‘If I go back to Earth,’ Yuri said flatly, ‘I won’t be free.’

‘There’s no question of imprisonment,’ Laughlin said. ‘Call it house arrest. Surveillance. Your movements will be monitored and curtailed, for as long as the legal process lasts.’

‘I’ll be put on trial for some crime deemed to have been committed by long-dead parents who shoved me in an ice box for eighty years.’

‘But that itself is an issue,’ King said. ‘Some prosecutors would argue that your parents did that in precisely the hope you would thereby evade any legal process. And . . .’

Yuri stopped listening. So he would be surrounded by walls of plastic and metal, his every step watched by a suspicious mankind, for the rest of his life.

He closed his eyes. He remembered that day when the shuttle had landed, and he’d climbed down to the surface of Proxima c for the first time, and there were no fences, no dome walls, just an arid plain, and he had just run and run until he was out of sight of every other human being in the universe. He imagined running, like that, with Beth at his side. I may as well have been left on Mars.

‘I’m going to Earth,’ Mardina said flatly. ‘Yuri, I’m sorry. Whatever the implications for you. That’s where my life is, always was. And Beth is coming with me. She’ll have a better life, and a longer one, than she would as a baby factory on Per Ardua. You know it.’