“We must help them,” the ColU said.
“Yeah. But we’ll be in charge,” Yuri said firmly. Kalinski looked at him strangely, but he ignored her. “ColU, let’s go to the hull, and get some warm clothing, and work out where to start.”
“One thing, Yuri Eden.”
“Yes?”
“I heard about the decisions made on Mercury. I’m sorry for your loss.” It held out a bundle of dried-out stems. Mister Sticks.
Yuri took the doll.
Then the ColU whirred, turned, and rolled away along a track that was now well worn, trampled down by eight years of use. Yuri followed briskly, carefully carrying the beat-up little doll.
Six
Chapter 65
2202
Five years after Stef Kalinski had disappeared into the Hatch to Proxima—and because of the lightspeed delays, with three more years left before Penny could even in principle discover for sure if her sister was alive or dead—Penny was invited to another major UN-China conference, this time on the cooperative exploitation of solar-system resources, to be held on Ceres, the Chinese-held asteroid.
Once again this was going to be all about politics and economics, not physics, and her first instinct was to refuse. But she came under heavy pressure to attend. As Sir Michael King and others pressed on her—she even got a note from Earthshine—for someone like her, so closely associated with kernel physics, to be invited to a conference on Ceres itself on UN-Chinese cooperative projects was a hugely symbolic gesture, just as before. But, aged fifty-eight now, she was a card that had been played too often, she thought. She was like an ageing rock star pulled out of retirement to celebrate the birthday of one too many Secretary Generals. A statement of mutual trust that, in the light of the ever worsening political situation, every time it was repeated had an air of increasing desperation about it.
And meanwhile there was increasingly bad news from all the worlds of mankind. Recently there had been heavily publicised (and suspiciously scrutinised) “disasters” on both political sides: a tsunami in the Atlantic, a dome collapse in a Chinese colony in the Terra Sirenum on Mars soon after… At first it looked as if each of these was natural, a gruesome coincidence of timing. Then fingers started to be pointed, accusations began to be made. Fringe groups claimed responsibility for the “attacks”, one in retaliation for the other. Some groups claimed responsibility for both.
But neither might have been attacks at all. Penny couldn’t see how you could determine the truth. Perhaps, given the poison of international relationships, the truth, in fact, didn’t matter any more. She was hearing dark conspiracy-theory mutterings of drastic provisions being drawn up by both sides in this gradually gathering war: fleets of kernel-drive battleships being constructed by the UN side, various exotic uses of their own interplanetary technology being planned by the Chinese… She supposed with her contacts she was in a better position than most to ferret out the truth of such rumours. But she preferred not to listen, not to think about it.
And now here she was, summoned to an asteroid. Still, King said with a wink, it might be fun to see Ceres.
The trip itself, her latest jaunt out of the heart of the solar system, began reasonably pleasantly. Aboard an ISF hulk ship running at a third standard gravity, close enough to Mercury-normal for her to feel comfortable, she had her own room, a workstation, and a generous allocation of communication time with Earth and Mercury, even though the round-trip time delays soon mounted up. She got a lot of work done, on a securely encrypted standalone slate. Kernel physics was still a closely guarded secret as far as the UN was concerned, although Penny did often wonder how much the Chinese must have learned through their various intelligence sources by now.
She had to make the trip in stages. Just as hulks were not allowed within the environs of Earth, so no UN-run, ISF-crewed kernel-powered hulk was allowed within a million kilometres of Ceres, the Chinese central base in the asteroid belt. The ISF crews joked blackly about what the Chinese could actually do about it if a hulk crew refused to comply and broke through the cordon, especially if it came in on the delicate Halls of Ceres in reverse, with the cosmic fire of kernels blazing from its rear like a huge flamethrower. But those arrogant kernel-tweakers of the ISF, Penny reminded herself, depended for all their achievements on a wholly inhuman technology: a technology that, some believed, humanity shouldn’t be using at all.
So after a flight of several days from Earth, her own kernel-driven hulk slid to a halt alongside a minor but water-rich asteroid, roughly co-orbiting with Ceres but well beyond the million-kilometre cordon. This battered lump of dusty water-ice was a convenient resupply depot, but mostly it served political purposes, as a kind of customs barrier, Penny saw, in the invisible frontier between the zones of influence of the UN nations and China. Here ships from both sides of the divide could gather, refuel, and exchange cargo, and passengers like Penny.
Penny peered out of her cabin window at the motley craft gathering here. In contrast to the blunt solidity of ISF kernel-powered hulks, Chinese ships, known as “junks” to ISF crew, were little more than sails, some of them hundreds of kilometres across. For propulsion the sails gathered sunlight, or the beams of ground-based lasers. It was a proven technology. Ceres was nearly three times as far from the sun as Earth, and sunlight was much less intense here, but robot ships from Earth with big solar-cell panels had been making use of the sun’s energy this far out since the twenty-first century. Robot riggers constantly worked the great sails. The sails were slow to respond to the tugging of the stay cables, and huge ripples crossed their surfaces, with the sharp light of the distant sun reflected in shifting spots and slowly evolving highlights.
Penny transferred to one of the Chinese junks, aboard which it would take another week to get to Ceres. UN-nation citizens were not allowed aboard such vessels without officially appointed “companions”. In the event, much to Penny’s relief, the aide assigned her was more than acceptable. It was Jiang Youwei, the young man who had similarly been her “guide” during her first visit to Mars five years ago. Jiang was as polite and attentive as ever, and just as pleasant to talk to as long as they stayed away from taboo subjects like kernel physics. And, though not quite as young as he had been, he was still cute enough to fill her idle hours with pleasant daydreams.
Penny settled into the rhythms of the journey easily. After the noisy engineering of the ISF hulks, the junk was peaceful. And by comparison with the heavy push of the hulk’s drive, the microgravity thrust exerted by the ship’s lightsail was barely noticeable, and silent too. Occasionally Penny would feel a faint wash of sensation in her gut, as if she was adrift in some ocean and caught by a gentle current. Or she would see a speck of dust drift down through the air, settling slowly. The Chinese crew, like Jiang, were polite, orderly—maybe a little repressed, she thought, but it made for a calm atmosphere. Even the remoteness of the sun gave her a sense of dreaminess, of peace.
She worked when she could concentrate, and exercised according to the routine politely suggested by Jiang, to avoid the usual microgravity loss of muscle tone and bone mass. She slept a lot, floating in her cocoon-like room, sometimes in darkness, sometimes with the walls set to transparency so that the stars, the sun, the sail with its vast slow ripples were a diorama around her. After a few days it was hard for her to tell if she was asleep or awake. Sometimes she dreamed of the smooth limbs and deep eyes of Jiang Youwei.