Yuri grunted. ‘I wonder what they think of all the fuss we make up here, then.’

The party spent a day at the site, observing, gathering samples, reflecting and hypothesising. Then they packed up and moved on.

CHAPTER 77

The rumble of the heavy vehicles’ passing made the deep ground shudder, briefly.

This unusual event was detected by vast, diffuse senses. Aeon-long dreams were interrupted.

The event was noted, a record of it seeping out through the communities in the deep rocks, where it was interpreted, classified, stored. Nothing came as a surprise to a mind that had already been two billion years old before the first complex cell had arisen on this world.

The vehicles soon receded, the disturbance was over. And in the chthonic silence the Dream of the End Time resumed.

CHAPTER 78

Penny Kalinski woke to the sound of laughing children.

In her life, she’d been woken up worse ways, she supposed. Even if the world was threatening to implode around her.

She checked the clock. It was a little before seven fifteen, dome time. Or Paris local time, officially, but dome time was the way she thought of it; sealed up down here in Earthshine’s bunker, living off an enclosed life-support system, she may as well have been in some hab on Mercury or the moon.

She pushed her way out of bed and padded through to the small living room, where Jiang Youwei lay in his fold-out bed. Jiang was sleeping soundly. He would sleep even through an alarm – though the one time there had been a genuine problem in the months they’d spent buried down here, when a siren had sounded a warning of contaminants in the recycled air, he’d been on his feet in a second, his military training kicking in.

Penny went through to the bathroom, and stood under the hot, faintly stale-smelling water of the shower. They only had the two rooms, plus the bathroom; Earthshine had colonised only a small stretch of the old Channel tunnel, and living space, along with power, air, water and food, was always at a premium. At that they were privileged to have private quarters at all, not to have to share the big dormitories and shared bathrooms that had been set up to accommodate everybody else.

And the tunnel was crowded now. The inmates were mostly families of support staff and of Earthshine’s drafted-in experts, and the children, grandchildren and even a few great-grandchildren of Sir Michael King, hastily flown in after the Splinter break-up and the closing in of the long cold – the Mighty Winter, as Earthshine called it.

Mindful of limited resources, after a brief shower Penny cut the water and dried off briskly.

Back in the living room the lights were bright. Jiang was up and about, flipping through pages on his slate with a practised finger. He had set a pot of coffee brewing in their small galley corner. As she passed, he absently handed Penny a full mug.

She pulled her clothes out of their small closet. She wore ISF-issue coveralls, self-cleaning and self-repairing, and all she had to do was shake out the detached dirt every day, a great saving in laundry water. She asked Jiang, ‘Busy day?’

‘Getting busier,’ Jiang said, studying his slate. ‘Maintenance this morning, some diplomatic stuff around noon . . . I will have a late finish. You?’

‘The school this morning, as I recall. After that – well, it depends on the Council resolution at lunchtime, and the fallout from that.’ The latest phase of the ongoing Council of Worlds talks was due to report back today.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Big day. I guess I’ll see you there.’

Though they were tucked away down here in this hole in the ground, as guests of Earthshine they were intimately connected to developing world affairs. The bloodless war between China and the UN nations had moved to a new phase in the months since the Splinter had arrived at Earth, and its dust had plunged the world into a sudden winter. A few resulting border conflicts had been easily contained. To the chagrin of Sir Michael King the rebellion against Chinese rule in Australia had been stomped upon; since then martial rule had been imposed on that continent, and vast numbers of native Aussies had been shipped out to other Chinese provinces in Indonesia, and further afield.

Across the Earth, indeed across the solar system, a new, uneasy truce had been called, and it still held, just about.

But now a new round of talks had begun, under the nominal chairmanship of the three Core AIs, Earthshine among them, who had emerged from their reclusive hideaways to offer a neutral platform on which negotiations and attempts at conciliation could begin. These were the so-called ‘Council of Worlds’ talks, usually restricted to the Earth but sometimes, in lengthy sessions incorporating time delays, with representations from Mercury, Mars, even Ceres. The chair was rotated mostly between Ifa and the Archangel, the AIs based in central Africa and South America respectively.

Sir Michael King, nearing his century but still in his chair at the head of UEI, was a key contributor. Penny had duties as an adviser on kernel physics. Jiang, one of the few Chinese down here in the tunnel, was expected to support the sessions with interpretation work, as well as reporting back personal impressions to New Beijing.

Well, the talks had ground on. Now there was a package of measures which seemed all but acceptable to most of the parties on the table: a mutual security pact; a tentative deal on the perpetual sticking point of the sharing of resources and information, including some Chinese access to kernel science; Earth to be designated a protectorate by both sides, the home of mankind ruled off-limits as a theatre of war. Whether any of it was going to be accepted was another question.

By the time Penny had finished her coffee, brushed her short hair, and was ready to go, Jiang had left already.

Outside, embedded in its tunnel, Earthshine’s little kingdom was beginning another day.

The big wall-mounted fluorescents, having been dimmed to match the waning of the daylight outside, were back up to full brightness. At this time of day people were on the move, a few night-shift workers standing down, the rest preparing for the labour of the day. Most of the work was maintenance of the systems that kept them all alive down here. A couple of the wall screens showed images from around a wintry planet, and on the rest there was a constant feed from the round-the-clock Council of Worlds talks.

Overall the big tunnel refuge had undergone a drastic and rapid transformation. When Penny had first arrived it had been little more than a kind of computer store, survival shelter and information node. Now, as the families had been moved in, the IT gear had been removed from the public areas, and living spaces had been set out: dormitory and toilet blocks, a small hospital, even a school for the kids.

And at this time, before the start of the working day, the school playground was full of noisy kids, climbing frames and rope swings, playing games like hopscotch, their voices echoing from the concrete walls of the tunnel. Penny watched them with a kind of wistfulness, part of her longing to shed the weight of her own decades and join in. But she noticed how pale they were, cooped up down here, cut off from fresh air and sunshine: a winterbound Paris, under its dismal dust-choked sky and riddled with refugees, wasn’t safe for children. The kids’ health was carefully monitored, but it seemed to Penny they were growing up with a kind of frantic energy that had to be burned off regularly, like a flare from a gas well.

‘We have become like a space station, buried in the ground.’ The grave voice was Earthshine’s. His virtual stood beside her dressed in the usual sober business suit.