Mardina tugged open her coat. “Warm around here, even without the fire.”
“Yes,” said Delga. “Thought as much even outside. Even without the fire. What’s the game, Mattock? Sitting on top of a volcano?”
He said gruffly, “You want tea?”
Delga grinned. “If you’ve got any crew-issue coffee left I’ll take some of that.”
“Not here,” he grumbled.
“Then don’t bother. Oh, here.” Delga dug into her backpack and produced a bottle.
Mattock took it cautiously. “What the hell’s this?”
Mardina said, “Klein vodka, we call it. From potatoes. Take it easy if you’ve not been used to it. A neighbourly offering.”
“We’d like the bottle back when it’s empty,” Yuri said.
“Hmph. Once I would have arrested the likes of you for carrying around illicit alcohol.”
Delga grinned. “Sure you would, and then drunk it yourself.”
Mardina said wearily, “Stow it, Delga. Look, Peacekeeper—why don’t you introduce us?”
Mattock did so with poor grace. “Bill Maven, Andrei Allen, Nancy Stiles. Sit down, for Christ’s sake.”
They sat on the floor, or on rickety chairs, trunks.
Mardina introduced her group in turn. “You’re all passengers, right? Except for you, Mattock.”
“I remember your face,” Yuri said to Andrei Allen. “From the ship.”
Allen shrugged indifferently.
“I remember you,” Nancy Stiles said to Mardina.
Mardina answered cautiously, “Oh, yes?”
“You never did me any harm, even if you were an astronaut. And anyhow, you’re not an astronaut any longer, are you? Not since they cast you down here with us. Any more than Tom Mattock here is a Peacekeeper, even if he does put on the uniform when he thinks strangers are going to show up.”
Delga laughed. “Really, Tom?”
“You’re the first that ever has, though, since the split.”
Yuri wondered: the split?
Mardina said, “I’m guessing you didn’t volunteer to stay down here, Mattock.”
“Nah. In this drop group there was a fatality on the way down, I mean in the shuttle itself. Heart attack, out of the blue, triggered by the deceleration. One of the men. I was the closest genetic match, according to the bastards who worked out those things on the Ad Astra. So I had to stay. Just like you, Lieutenant.”
Delga laughed again. “Stories like that make my own shit life worthwhile. You always were a butthole, Mattock, and you got what you deserved.”
Mattock scowled back. “How many in your group?”
“About fifty,” Mardina said. “A good number of children, some of them nearly grown—well, you saw one outside, my daughter.”
“Our daughter,” Yuri said gently.
“Fifty. Jesus.”
“And you,” Yuri said, “are, what, six adults?”
Delga asked, “So what happened to the other eight, Tom? Murder them in their beds, did you?”
“It wasn’t like that,” Andrei said. “They went their way, we went ours.”
Mardina frowned. “They?”
“We’re white. They weren’t. All sorts of shades, but none of ’em like us. Didn’t want them fathering our kids… We didn’t do them any harm. They went their way, we went ours,” he said again.
“That was the split you talked about,” Yuri said.
Mattock just nodded.
They had come across this before. Many of the already tiny parties the Ad Astra shuttle had brought down seemed to have splintered further, separating out by race, usually, or sometimes by religion, or sexual orientation.
“Well,” Delga said gleefully, “we’re all sorts, in our fifty. And our kids are a mixture too. What do you call your Beth, Mardina? A muda-muda. A half-caste. That’s us. Just a big bunch of mixed-up muda-mudas.” She laughed again, showing her teeth. “We’re going to get along just fine with you white boys.”
“Don’t pay her any attention,” Yuri said. “She likes stirring up trouble. We’ll get by.”
“Oh no, we won’t,” snapped Mattock. “You people can just keep right on moving. Pass through our land if you want, but you ain’t stopping here.”
“ ‘Our land’?” Delga murmured menacingly.
Andrei Allen leaned forward. “We found this place. We came trekking down the river just like you…”
“Good God,” Mardina murmured. “Did nobody stay where McGregor put them?”
“We were trying to get away from the cold, the winter. And we found this place, and it stayed that bit warmer—”
“How come?” Mardina asked.
Delga shook her head. “These hayseeds don’t know, astronaut. No use asking.”
“We planted our crops and we built our homes and we raised our kids, and we’re not going anywhere,” Allen said.
“And we’re not sharing,” Mattock said fiercely.
Mardina stayed calm. “There are fifty of us, Tom, and a half-dozen of you. I reckon that if we decide to stick around here you won’t have much choice about it.”
Delga laughed again. “Might is right, huh, Peacekeeper?”
Mattock glared back, red-faced. He’d been a bully on the ship, Yuri remembered, and was no doubt a bully in this little community now, lording it over his fellow colonists. A bully who was now being defied. Yuri was aware that he still had his rifle.
Just at that moment of tension Beth stuck her head in the door. “I know,” she said brightly.
Mardina asked warily, “You know what?”
“Why it’s warmer here, in this place. I heard you arguing.”
“We weren’t arguing—”
“The ColU worked it out. Come and see!”
The ColU rolled cautiously across the land colonised by the Arduan-green sheets, sticking to open ground. “It’s typical of Arduan life,” it said. “These ground-covering ‘plants’ aren’t plants at all. They’re kites!”
Beth, Yuri and Mardina followed, treading carefully. They had come maybe half a kilometre from the domes of Mattock’s settlement. From here they had a clear view of the river confluence, the two valleys snaking off to the south. And they were surrounded by alien life.
Cautiously the ColU extended a manipulator arm to prod a nearby growth, right at the junction point of its three sprawling “leaves”. The leaves fluttered and shook and rose up, and Yuri saw, yes, it was one end of a kite, and a nearby triple leaf was the other end, a big, fat clumsy kite with the characteristic six vanes of its kind. The vanes trailed tendrils, grubby threads anchored to the ground. Disturbed, the kite shook itself free of the grasping tendrils, flapped and whirled its vanes, and took off, clattering noisily away through the air until it was out of reach of the ColU. It came to a relatively open patch of ground where it settled again and spread out its vanes, snapping them open with what looked like irritation.
A cloud cleared, and the light of Proxima beat down almost vertically on the ground cover. There was a creak of shifting leaves, they barely moved, but Yuri somehow sensed the kites were basking.
“Those trailing threads are some kind of roots,” the ColU said. “Made up of chains of small, jointed stems.”
“It’s the light, isn’t it?” Mardina said. “It’s all about access to the light.”
“Yes. We’re seeing a local adaptation to the position of the star, and maybe the winter. Life on this world always competes to grab as much of the light flow of the parent star as it can. Up in the north, approaching the terminator, you can best do that by becoming a tree, growing tall and angling your big leaves at the unmoving sun. Here, Proxima is almost directly overhead. You don’t need to go to all the expense of growing a trunk; you can just cover the flat ground and let the light beat down on you. And as long as you maintain that cover, nothing else can take root and grow over you.”