Liu said, “The security troops at the Hub.”
Yuri tried to make light of it. “What did she do, throw a brick at them? They’ve been winding down the detachment there.”
“Not arrested,” Liu said, barely holding it together. “Confined. They put her in one of their camps.”
“Ah. Oh, shit.”
The internment camps were a recent, and unwelcome, development, and a sideshow of the war gathering in the solar system.
Since Yuri and Stef Kalinski had returned through the Hatch together twelve years ago to a volcanic winter, things had slowly got better climate-wise on Per Ardua—which was a good thing as the immigrants from Earth through the Hatch had started to arrive almost immediately. But recently, things had evidently been getting worse politically back home. The flow of people through the Hatch had slowed to a trickle, as the inner system’s resources were devoted to the gathering interplanetary conflict rather than to shipping emigrants around the inner planets. Indeed, many of the UN troops stationed here at Per Ardua had been sent back to the solar system.
But some of the UN’s Cold-War type security strictures had been imposed here on Per Ardua, as back home. And, it seemed, there were still enough troops to spare the time to pick up Liu Tao’s daughter.
Yuri grunted. “What the hell they think they’ll achieve with internment camps here on Per Ardua I don’t know. This is our country, our world. It’s like an infection of paranoia, spreading through the Hatch. The sooner the last UN trooper drags his sorry arse back through the Hatch the better.”
“Which,” Liu said, “is probably the kind of rhetoric that got Thursday in trouble. She’s fallen in with some of those youth movements. ‘Ardua for Arduans’—you know. Any kind of activity like that is dangerous if you’ve got Thursday’s ethnic background. Yuri, we’ve got to get her out of there.”
“Of course we’ve got to. The three of us, we’ll go into the Hub together, and we won’t come out without her. OK?”
Liu didn’t seem relieved, or reassured, but at least he seemed gratified at the support, and to be doing something about it. “I’ll drive.”
“Like hell. In your state you’ll kill us all. Stef, go fetch a rover.”
Stef nodded. But as the three of them stood stiffly—three old people, aware of their age when they moved—Stef murmured to Yuri, “You shouldn’t make promises you can’t be sure you can keep. Bad habit, Yuri…”
“What are you getting at?”
“I know the UN and the ISF a lot better than you do. Be ready for the worst.”
Chapter 69
Away from the UN base at the Hub—as the substellar zone had come to be known, the area of Per Ardua most firmly controlled by human authorities now ironically labelled with a builder name—rovers and other vehicles were still rare, still precious. Since the Ad Astra, there had never been another starship visit to Per Ardua, and any heavy-duty machinery imported from the solar system had to be broken down into components and carried through the Hatch, usually on the backs of immigrants. But Yuri Eden, Stef Kalinski, Liu Tao, the triumvirate who dominated the community at the Mattock Confluence, were about the richest, most powerful people on Per Ardua, away from the island of UN influence itself at the Hub. They had done well in skimming off the wealth and power associated with the one-way immigrant flow over the last decade.
So a rover was soon provided for them.
Stef Kalinski drove rapidly, steadily, safely, inwards to the Hub. Though she was as much an absorbed intellectual as she ever had been, Yuri observed that Stef had found ways to fit in, here on this very different world. Thanks to her ISF military training she had come equipped with common sense, courage, and practical competences. And, Yuri suspected, she was a lot happier with a thickness of four light years between her and her unwanted “twin”—though even after all this time he still wasn’t sure he believed all the kooky stuff she’d tentatively shared with him about that. In any event, Stef was a silent, focused driver, even when she let the rover navigate itself. That wasn’t unwise, as the world, still recovering from its volcanic winter, was an unpredictable place.
Liu sat silently too, staring at the road ahead as they drove south. For him the ride was clearly just an interval to be endured before he got on with the issue of saving his daughter.
So, in the quiet, Yuri had time to stare out of the window at his changing world.
This road, metalled in places, was a rough descendant of the track he and Mardina and the rest had trodden out as they had marched south to the substellar all those years ago, heading upstream along the course of the great river system that flowed north out of the Hub uplands—a feature now called, logically enough, the North River. For years the track had run across a frozen landscape. Now the road ran on thawed-out but firm ground past meltwater lakes, and on rough bridges over gushing tributary streams.
The long cold was passing now, the volcanic ash screen that had exacerbated the effects of the star winter clearing at last, and you rarely saw ice this far south any more. The winter had caused misery for humanity, particularly for the new arrivals on this world, utterly unprepared.
But Arduan life itself was hardier, and was surely adapted to a changeable climate. The ColU said it had observed shoots of new stems springing up from beneath the fallen ash within weeks of the volcanic event. By now the lakes, emerging from beneath the ice, were already hosts to new communities of builders, with their nurseries and middens and traps. The builders knew, the ColU said; the builders had memories and legends, it believed, spanning the cycles of the deep, deep past. Yuri, using what influence he had, had tried to set up a kind of exclusion zone around the jilla, the migratory lake that had guided him and Mardina south. He wanted to know if the same builders would now guide that lake back north again, to begin the cycle again…
As for the stromatolites, those great dreaming mounds barely seemed to notice the winter. And, the ColU said, the bugs in the deep rocks, where the bulk of Per Ardua’s biomass resided, as on every rocky world, would have been entirely unaware.
But the post-winter landscape of Per Ardua was dramatically different from before. It had become a human landscape, crowded with people and their works. Now the rover drove past farming villages founded by the new colonists with the help of their own ColUs, cut down, more flexible modern units. For a decade immigrants had been emerging from that single central point at the Hub, the Hatch, a doorway just a few metres across, like oil seeping from a well in the desert. And they had been pushing out of the Hub in all directions across the patient face of Per Ardua, north and south, east and west, but especially following the great rivers. It was an odd pattern of colonisation, Yuri thought—and a big contrast to the scattered pattern of the Founders’ first communities, dropped almost at random from the sky by the shuttles from the Ad Astra.
Further in towards the Hub they passed through a more densely populated belt of industrialisation. Here were forges and smelters, plants churning out tools and engines, diggers and borers, factories built of local-dirt concrete and stem-forest timber and fed by river water carried by gleaming pipelines. In this industrial zone, already a pall of smoke from the local coal and timber hung in the air, a genuine smog on some still days, blanketing the factories and processing plants and dormitory-block apartments, over which the vertical light of Proxima Centauri steadily beat down. Like the farming communities further out, there was a whole band of this kind of development spread in a rough circle around the pivotal point of the Hub, though pushing further out wherever the major rivers ran.