Kalinski turned to face her passengers. “I like to drive myself, generally. But I thought I’d better not take a chance with such a precious cargo.”
“Thanks,” Mardina said with a sneer.
“Oh, come on, Mom,” Beth said. “Colonel Kalinski’s being very kind to us.” She seemed to be over her partial-gravity nausea, and was looking around more brightly. “I can’t see much out of these funny little windows. Is that because of the sun?”
Kalinski said, “Yes… Do you know much about Mercury, Beth?”
“Does the sun stay in one place in the sky, like Per Ardua?”
Kalinski took the name on board. “Per Ardua. That’s Prox c. OK. No, Mercury has a day that’s two-thirds of its year. It’s to do with tidal resonances. As a result the sun kind of wanders around the sky, as seen from the ground, going west, then east. The whole pattern repeats every two Mercury years. Which is a hundred and seventy-six Earth days.”
Tollemache said, “From what I saw the sun is pretty high just here.”
“That’s right. We’re close to the equator, and it’s local noon—or midsummer. The biggest UN base is at the north pole, on the Boreas Planitia, where there are permanent shadows, ice. This is the Caloris basin. A giant impact crater. Which is why the ground is a broken-up jumble. It’s a difficult place to operate, and we wouldn’t have any kind of permanent base here at all, I guess, if it wasn’t for the kernel beds, and the Hatch being found here. It’s posed all kinds of technical challenges, working here.”
Yuri spotted movement on the desolate ground outside: what looked like tremendous cockroaches, with wide, iridescent wings. They were humans, some kind of astronauts, surface workers, in suits like segmented armour, in brilliant silver. Those wings spread wide from the back. As the rover approached, one of them stood straight and waved. No face was visible behind a golden dome of a helmet. Yuri, bemused, waved back.
Then there were flashes at the windows, brilliant enough to light up the whole interior of the rover. Beth recoiled, rubbing her eyes.
“Sorry.” Kalinski pressed a screen, and covers closed over the windows. “Camera flashes. I told you there’d been leaks. Your faces will be all over the inner system already. Those guys must be being paid well to risk the discipline charges.”
The rover slowed, and Yuri heard a dull impact on the opaque hull, some kind of docking. Within seconds the hatch opened again, leading to a brightly lit tunnel.
“Here we go,” Kalinski said. “Dome Z. I’ll be going through decon too, having been in contact with you, and the Hatch. We’ll have to strip, I’m afraid; your clothes will be cleaned and returned later. Men that way, women this, follow me…”
At the other end of the tunnel, Peacekeepers waited for them, in containment suits, heavily armed.
For Yuri and Tollemache, it took four days, of showers, heat baths, body fluid samples, full-body scans, tasteless meals, interrogations of various kinds, and periods of uneasy sleep, before the doctors finally slipped off their surgical masks and shook their hands. “It’s been a unique experience, gentlemen. Thank you.”
“Kiss my ass,” said Tollemache. “Where are my pants?”
As it turned out their clothes were not returned to them. For one thing the colonists’ scraps of stem-bark cloth were the first samples of Arduan life solar-system-based scientists had got their hands on directly, since the sparse samples returned by the Ad Astra years earlier. There were even anthropologists on hand, Yuri learned, eager to pore over the handicrafts of the emergent human communities of Proxima c.
Tollemache was given a fresh Peacekeeper uniform. Yuri noticed it was beefier than the old design, with toughened pads at shoulders, neck, elbows, knees, and a kind of utility belt with pouches and loops, ready for weapons. Evidently Peacekeeping in the modern solar system was a more dangerous game than it used to be. For his part, Yuri was handed an orange jumpsuit just like the kind he’d been issued with when he was first pulled out of the cryo tank on Mars. Some things didn’t change.
They were brought to a kind of lounge, with padded couches, a bar serving soft drinks and coffee, and a big picture window with a view of the battered surface of Mercury, shaded from the sun. Here at last they were reunited with Mardina and Beth, and Colonel Kalinski. Mardina was already devouring coffee, picking up where she’d left off at the Hub base on Per Ardua. She wore a smart astronaut uniform, black and silver. Beth, though, was in an orange jumpsuit like her father’s.
Beth hugged Yuri. But they pulled apart, uncertain, dressed up in strange clothes, even smelling wrong. Yuri forced a smile, uncertainly.
Yuri helped himself to a soda. It bubbled oddly in the low gravity; he’d never had a soda on Mars. “So, twenty-eight years after waking up on Mars—”
“Thirty-two,” Kalinski murmured. “You jumped another four years in the Hatch, remember.”
“Shit. Here I am back in a jumpsuit, like a convict.”
Beth came over and linked his arm. “Never mind, Dad. I’m a convict too.”
“Yeah. The difference is the uniform looks good on you.”
“And I still have this.” She stroked the tattoo that covered half her face. “They couldn’t scrub that off in their decon. But, you know, they offered to remove it for me there and then. Said I’d fit in better.”
“You’d ‘fit in’. Where?”
“Earth,” Mardina said bluntly.
Beth stroked her tattoo again. “I’m not from Earth. I’m from Per Ardua.”
“Quite right, honey,” and Yuri kissed her on the cheek. “We’ll work it out somehow.” He looked at Mardina in her ISF suit. “I’m surprised you let them dress you up in that thing. The ISF dumped you on Per Ardua.”
She looked at him steadily. “But I wasn’t born on Per Ardua. This was my career, Yuri. This is who I was, and am. I’m still an officer in the ISF, I’m told. Even though they haven’t figured out what rank I am; strictly speaking I was retired with honours when I was left behind at Proxima.”
Tollemache said, “There’s talk of back pay. You ought to chase that up, Jones. But we probably won’t need it, we’re all going to earn a fortune out of this.” He grinned, gulping down some kind of fruit drink. “What a break! I bet those assholes Brady and Keller will be sick as shit when they hear about this.” He mused, “In another four years’ time, I guess. Good. Give me time to milk it before sharing it with them.”
Yuri looked at him in disgust. “You really are a charmer, Tollemache.”
He just laughed. “You got to take your chances in this life.”
“Good point,” said a newcomer, a man, old, short, plump, bustling into the room. “That Hatch of yours, Peacekeeper Tollemache, could be a chance for all of us—an opportunity crucial to the future of two stellar systems, and to the whole destiny of mankind.” In his eighties maybe, he wore what looked like a business suit, with thin lapels, a kind of cravat, shiny fake-leather shoes. Behind him came another man, tall, grave, thin as a builder’s stem limb, in a well-cut astronaut uniform with officer stripes on his upper arm.
Kalinski stepped forward with a professional smile. “Good to see you, sir. I need to introduce you. This is Sir Michael King—”
This was the tubby businessman type. He winked at Kalinski. “Stef, your twin sends her regards.” Then he strode forward and shook all their hands; his grip was surprisingly firm, a worker’s handshake. “I’m president and CEO of Universal Engineering, Inc., the prime contractor with responsibility for developing the resources of Mercury on behalf of the nations and peoples of the UN.” He studied Yuri. “You’re the fella from the ice, right? Rip Van Winkle. What do you call yourself—Yuri Eden? Well, I’m the guy whose company built the ship that took you to Mars, and the Ad Astra that delivered you all the way to Proxima Centauri. What do you think of that?”