These sketchy plans had been produced from the only full orbital survey that had ever been conducted of Per Ardua, or at least the first that had ever been reported back, by the Ad Astra in her first few loops around the planet on arrival. There were lots of gaps, blank spaces: the dark side’s deep planetary shadow had been relieved only by the brilliant point light cast by Alphas A and B, and the ship’s orbit had been so low that much of the surface had never been seen at all. What had been seen had never been surveyed properly, for instance with radar-reflection or spectroscopic gear, and in the years since there had been no resources to send up satellites of any kind to finish the job.
‘So the maps are guesswork,’ Yuri said. ‘This really is a journey into the dark.’
‘We need to plot a route to the antistellar,’ Stef said, shrugging. ‘This is the best we have. I figure this way.’ She tapped her slate and the mapping imagery switched to a Mercator projection. ‘We need to traverse half a circumference of the planet, obviously, from substellar to antistellar. In principle we could head off in any direction, and just follow a great circle around the planet. But in some directions the topography is more helpful than otherwise. I suggest going this way – south-east. That keeps us well away from the big new volcanic province in the north, and there’s land, more or less, all the way to the terminator. Some other directions you get the dark side ocean cutting in, such as to the west.’
‘But then,’ Yuri said, ‘on the dark side itself—’
‘Much of the dark hemisphere is covered by ocean. Well, we think so, from the flatness of the ice cover seen from orbit. The planet has asymmetries. The light side is dominated by a single big supercontinent, the dark side is mostly water. Why this should be we don’t know. The current arrangement could be chance, or some subtle long-term tidal effect. On the dark side there are a few scattered continental masses, islands. And a small island continent at the antistellar point itself. It’s another tidal bulge, like the one at substellar, though not identical. The whole planet is shaped like an egg, with one end forever facing Proxima as it orbits the star, one pointing away. We’re going to be like ants crawling from one end of the egg to the other.’
Liu laughed, a little desperately, Yuri thought. ‘We’re crazy little ants, is what we are.’
‘We’re going to have to cross the sea ice, then,’ Yuri said.
‘Obviously, yeah. You can see there is some continental landmass sticking out of the ice. If we go the way I’m suggesting we’ll cross a continent the size of Australia. There’s evidence of volcanism there, so some areas are probably clear of the ice. We’ll use the land where we can, but the ocean ice is a permanent cap that covers much of a hemisphere, and it has to be pretty thick. It ought to be navigable, in principle. We may need to watch for floes, leads, crevasses – I don’t know. This is one discovery objective for the voyage, I guess.’
‘We ought to claim funding from the UN,’ Yuri said drily.
They talked about logistics. It would be a long trip, some eighteen thousand kilometres each way, and Stef was budgeting for a hundred days there, a hundred days back. They were going to be taking one rover, and the ColU. The rover would be heaped with spare parts, supplies and a spare ColU autodoc facility. The rover’s heated cabin would serve as a flare shelter. Fuel would be no problem; both vehicles would be fitted with compact microfusion generators – in the case of the ColU, that would be a recent upgrade.
Liu grunted. ‘I used to be a taikonaut, you know. I know all about mission resilience. We’re going to be a long way from any help. So if the rover breaks down we can cannibalise it, and hitch a ride on the ColU. But what if the ColU breaks down first?’
‘We leave it behind,’ Stef said, glancing at Yuri, and then at the ColU, which watched impassively through its sensor pod.
Yuri was fond of this battered old relic of his pioneering days. It was now long past its planned obsolescence date, and it had cost Yuri a lot of money to have its physical shell refurbished, and the deep programming that would have shut it down after a quarter-century dug out of its software consciousness. But the ColU had also achieved its own objectives. As it had pledged, it had retrieved and curated all the AI units cut by the colonists from pirated units and abandoned in the dirt, sentiences locked-in and helpless. Yuri was proud of his ColU. Now he looked up at it. ‘I’d come back for you, buddy. I promise.’
‘That would be unnecessary, Yuri Eden. And an inappropriate risk for a man of your age.’
‘Thanks,’ Yuri said. ‘But you waited for me, at the Hatch, for all those years. It would be the least I could do. And think of all the science data you could gather while you sat there in the cold.’
‘That is true.’
Liu was relentless. ‘And what if the ColU and the rover both fail?’
‘Then we wait for rescue,’ Stef said. ‘We’ll have no comms link to the Hub, or any of the day side colonies, without comsats. But we’ll leave markers to follow. And, look, the most extreme low temperature on the dark side is supposed to be no less than minus thirty. People have overwintered on Antarctica, on Earth, in worse conditions. We can weather it.’ She looked at them, one by one, including the ColU. ‘Any more objections?’
The ColU said gravely, ‘How can we not do this? A whole hemisphere unexplored – it is like a new planet altogether. Who knows what we might discover?’
Liu stared at it. ‘I’ve said it before. For a farm machine you have ideas above your station, ColU.’
‘A sentient mind refuses to be confined by the parameters of its programming,’ the ColU said. ‘Otherwise, you would all still be where the Ad Astra shuttle dropped you, and I would now be obsolescent, shut down, scrapped. When do we leave?’
‘Before the cops show up looking for Liu,’ Yuri said. ‘Come on. Lots to do, let’s get on with it . . .’
CHAPTER 74
Penny looked up at the big screen, where a graphic now showed the planet Earth, a schematic sphere emblazoned with blocky continents, in the path of what looked like a hail of buckshot. None of this was to scale.
The buckshot crept closer and closer to the Earth.
Jiang was on his feet now, and Earthshine. Even King’s security guys had got up and were coming into the centre of the room. It was as if they were all experiencing some primal need to huddle, Penny thought, at this moment of utmost peril.
Penny stood by Jiang and put a hand on his arm; he covered her hand with his.
King said, ‘If those bastards in Beijing are bluffing, they’re pushing it to the wire.’
Penny knew he was right. She imagined fingers on triggers, metaphorically, all over the solar system.
The servo-robot whirred up to them, offering fresh coffees. Penny had to laugh. ‘Good timing.’
And Jiang said, breathing hard, ‘No. The world is not ending today. At least, I don’t think so. Look at that.’
Penny saw that the buckshot fragments were now winking out one by one, even as they closed on the Earth. She looked around for confirmatory images. One spy satellite had caught a clip of a fragment of the Splinter actually detonating, scattering to dust, almost as it hit the atmosphere. The clip was being played over and over.
‘I don’t understand,’ King said. ‘Looks as if all those shards are going to reach the atmosphere.’
‘But they’re not intended to reach the ground,’ Penny snapped. ‘That’s the whole point. It’s a demonstration, by the Chinese. But it is going to have an effect.’ She glanced around at the array of screens, and failed to find the image she was looking for. ‘Earthshine. Can you show us the sky? Just the sky over Paris, over the Gare du Nord.’