A woman in a similar uniform, standing at the door with a slate, stopped Liu and Yuri as they entered. Yuri read her name tag: ISF LT MARDINA JONES. Maybe thirty, she was very dark, with tightly curled black hair. “You’re late,” she said.
“Sorry. Just out of medical.” Liu gave their names.
“Name tags?”
Liu dug his out of a pocket and showed it to her; she scanned it with her slate. She turned to Yuri. “You?”
Yuri just shrugged.
Liu said, “Like I said, just out of medical.”
“Just awake, huh.” Jones shook her head and made a note on her slate. “Typical. Make sure you sort it out later.” She had a thick Australian accent. “Sit, you’re late.”
Finding a seat in the semi-darkened little theatre turned out to be a problem. Three guys sat together on a row of a dozen otherwise empty seats. When Yuri went to sit down in the row Liu prodded him in the back. “Move on,” he whispered.
Yuri had been quick to anger ever since he’d first woken up on Mars. “Why should I?”
“Because that middle guy is Gustave Klein. Wait until you’re beefed up before you take him on.”
But it was already too late, Yuri realised. Klein was white, maybe fifty years old, hefty if not overweight, head elaborately shaven. His fists, resting on his knees, were like steam hammers. And Yuri had made eye contact with him. He barely noticed the two guys with Klein, typical attack dogs. Klein leered at Liu, taking in his injuries, and looked away, dismissive.
They moved on, cautious in the dark. “What’s so special about him?”
“He was the best Sabatier-furnace engineer in his colony,” Liu whispered. “That’s part of the recycling system—you know that, right? And he fixed it so that nobody else could touch those systems. He was a damn water king. No wonder they shipped him out. And it looks like he’s fixing to get the same hold here.”
“A water king.” Yuri grinned. “Until it rains, right?”
Liu looked at him strangely.
Somebody hissed. “Yuri! Hey, Yuri! Over here!” A skinny, shambling form hustled along a row, clearing two spaces, to muttered complaints from the people behind.
“Lemmy?” It was the first familiar voice he’d heard since waking in the can. Yuri sat beside him, followed by Liu.
“Awake at last, huh?” Lemmy’s whisper was soft, practised. “That bastard Tollemache really shot you up, didn’t he? Well, he got what he deserved.”
Yuri tried to figure it out. Lemmy Pink, nineteen years old, had been the nearest thing to a friend Yuri had made on Mars. Even if Lemmy was only looking for protection.
The last Yuri remembered of Mars was that he and Lemmy had busted out of their dome. Yuri had had to get out. Every atom in his body longed to be out there on the Martian ground, frozen, ultraviolet-blasted desert though it might be. He’d been taken through spacesuit and airlock drills for the sake of emergency training, but he’d never been outside. Mostly he never even got to look through a window. So they’d stolen a rover, made a run for the hills, a local feature called the Chaos—flipped the truck, been picked up by the Peacekeepers. He remembered Tollemache. You’re the ice boy, right? Nothing but a pain in the butt since they defrosted you. Well, you won’t be my problem much longer. And with a gloved fist he had jammed a needle into Yuri’s neck, and the red-brown Martian light had folded away…
And he’d woken up in this tank.
“What do you mean, he got what he deserved?”
“He’s here too. In the hull. Ha! He got what was coming to him, all right. But it was because he didn’t stop us pinching that rover in the first place, rather than what he did to you.”
Yuri mock-punched his arm. “Good to see they brought you home too, man.”
Lemmy flinched back. “Don’t touch me. I’m full of the fucking sniffles that are going around this coffin, typical of me to get them all.”
“What about Krafft?” Lemmy’s pet rat, back in the dome.
Lemmy’s face fell. “Well, they took him off me. What would you expect?”
“I’m sorry.”
They were disturbing the astronaut type giving his lecture. Mardina Jones was right behind them, her voice a severe murmur. “If you two buttheads don’t shut up and listen to Major McGregor I’ll put you on a charge.”
They shut up. But when she withdrew, Lemmy was staring at Yuri, in the shadowy dark. “What was that you just said?”
“What? About the rat?”
“No. Something about them bringing us home.”
“I don’t know, man. I don’t know if I’m asleep or awake.” But Lemmy kept staring at him.
Yuri, disoriented, confused, distracted by the noise of the crowds just half a metre beyond the partition, looked up at the astronaut at the lectern in his glittering black-as-night uniform. On Mars everybody had hated the astronauts, because they were rotated, they got to go home. Yuri tried to concentrate on what he was saying.
“Even a single pixel from these very early images of the new world told the astronomers a great deal. Spectral analysis revealed an atmosphere with free oxygen, methane, nitrous oxide.”
Major McGregor, maybe late twenties, was tall, upright, whip-thin but athletic, with a healthy glow to his cheeks in the light of the images he showed. He had a slick Angleterre accent, and his hair, blond, brushed, oiled, looked like it got more care than most of the people in this facility.
“Oxygen, think of that! Suddenly we had a habitable world, right on our doorstep. All of you have had experience of the colonies on Mars and the moon—bleak, inhospitable worlds, and yet the best the solar system has to offer. And now, suddenly, this.
“With time, variations of brightness and spectral content told us something about the distribution of continents and oceans. More subtle variations had to reflect changing weather. Not only that, the presence of oxygen is a strong indicator of life, I mean native life, because something has to be putting all that oxygen in the air.” He displayed graphs, wriggling lines. “This prominent feature in the red part of the spectrum indicated the presence of something like our own chlorophyll, some kind of light-harvesting pigment. All deduced from watching a single point of light…”
Yuri had no idea what he was talking about. But he had spent a great deal of his time since being woken on Mars not knowing what the hell was going on around him, and it didn’t seem to make any material difference.
He was aware that that caveman Klein was watching him. He started to think of how he was going to deal with that, as the astronaut’s voice droned on and on.
But Lemmy was still staring at him, as if he was working something out. “Nobody told you. My God.”
“Told me what?”
Gustave Klein seemed to have an instinct for trouble. He leaned forward. “What’s this?”
Lemmy ignored him. “You said something about being sent home. I just figured it out. You think this is home, don’t you? You think this is—”
“Earth?” Liu Tao asked now, wondering, staring at Yuri.
Klein stood up. “He thinks what? What kind of asshole—”
The class was breaking up, the “students” turning in their seats to see what the commotion was. Major McGregor shut up at last, frowning in annoyance before his spectrograms.
Mardina Jones hurried up again from the back, tapping an epaulette on her shoulder. “Peacekeeper to Level 3, lecture room… What’s going on here? Is this something to do with you, Eden?”