live.’
‘Really?’
She stared at him. ‘All those briefings we gave. You really have learned nothing, have you?’
‘Where’s everybody else?’
‘Who?’
‘The other groups. Brought down by the shuttle before us.’
‘A long way from here. Major McGregor will tell you all about it. In the meantime you go sit over there with those others. We’ve got supplies to unload for our stay here, and for
your first few weeks and months as residents. Also a ColU.’
Yuri didn’t know what a ColU was. ‘And then you’re going?’
She slapped the hull of the shuttle. ‘This bird will scramjet its way back to the sky – yes, we’re going. Now, if I release your hobble will you go and sit with the
rest?’
‘Yes.’
She bent down, took a knife from her belt, and slit through the hobble.
He took a step towards the seated group. Then another step, and another, and then broke into a run. A jog really, it was awkward with his hands tied together, but he could do this. He ran,
stretching his legs, the dirt firm under his booted feet.
Ran right past the seated group, who whooped and hollered.
He heard voices behind him. ‘Hey, ice boy! Stop or—’
‘Or what, Mattock? You going to run him down? Ah, let him go. I mean, where’s he going to run to? A thousand klicks to the next group? He’ll be back. Look, give me a hand with
this food pack . . .’
And Yuri ran and ran, on beyond the dust kicked up by the shuttle on landing, on over the virgin dirt, on far beyond the bounds of any cramped little Martian colony like Eden – on until
their voices were small behind him, and when he looked back the shuttle sitting on its undercarriage looked like a black-and-white toy on a tabletop – on towards that forest, and the
mountains.
That was why he was the last to hear that, sometime during the descent when attentions were otherwise engaged, Abbey Brandenstein had stabbed Joseph Mullane in the heart with a sharpened plastic
toothbrush.
CHAPTER 10
2155
O n Angelia’s last night in the human world, Dr Kalinski cherished her. That was how she thought of it, on later reflection.
Still in the form of her weighty humanoid body, she was taken to dinner with Dr Kalinski and his daughter Stef, and members of the control crew who would care for her during her ten-year flight
to Proxima: people like Bob Develin and Monica Trant, competent twenty- or thirty-somethings, all employees of national space agencies now subsumed into a global UN agency which only the Chinese,
their Framework partners and a few outliers like North Britain had declined to join. ‘Only’: much of interplanetary space travel, in fact, was dominated by the new Chinese empire. They
spoke openly, loosely, treating Angelia as one of the crew, as
human
, sometimes even speaking as if she wasn’t there at all, which paradoxically made her feel more welcome, more
included.
But she learned more about their concerns regarding the mission than Dr Kalinski had told her about before. That perhaps it was obsolete, technologically, before it was even launched, given the
UEI kernel developments. That it wasn’t very popular politically in higher circles in the UN: it had a whiff of the Heroic Generation, whose projects had been characterised by massive,
wasteful engineering, and loaded with AIs of a quality of sentience that had later been made illegal retrospectively. After all, Dr Kalinski had grown up in the wake of the Generation and their
mighty works; maybe he was influenced by them. So the whispers went.
Dr Kalinski had done his best to shield his project from those criticisms. Yes, he had needed some big-scale equipment, but even though he had reused a solar-power station, itself a much-hated
relic of the past Heroic age with its hubristic planetary engineering schemes, he would use energies of orders of magnitude
less
than those that had hurled Dexter Cole to Proxima. As for
profit, Dr Kalinski eschewed any
‘Really?’
She stared at him. ‘All those briefings we gave. You really have learned nothing, have you?’
‘Where’s everybody else?’
‘Who?’
‘The other groups. Brought down by the shuttle before us.’
‘A long way from here. Major McGregor will tell you all about it. In the meantime you go sit over there with those others. We’ve got supplies to unload for our stay here, and for
your first few weeks and months as residents. Also a ColU.’
Yuri didn’t know what a ColU was. ‘And then you’re going?’
She slapped the hull of the shuttle. ‘This bird will scramjet its way back to the sky – yes, we’re going. Now, if I release your hobble will you go and sit with the
rest?’
‘Yes.’
She bent down, took a knife from her belt, and slit through the hobble.
He took a step towards the seated group. Then another step, and another, and then broke into a run. A jog really, it was awkward with his hands tied together, but he could do this. He ran,
stretching his legs, the dirt firm under his booted feet.
Ran right past the seated group, who whooped and hollered.
He heard voices behind him. ‘Hey, ice boy! Stop or—’
‘Or what, Mattock? You going to run him down? Ah, let him go. I mean, where’s he going to run to? A thousand klicks to the next group? He’ll be back. Look, give me a hand with
this food pack . . .’
And Yuri ran and ran, on beyond the dust kicked up by the shuttle on landing, on over the virgin dirt, on far beyond the bounds of any cramped little Martian colony like Eden – on until
their voices were small behind him, and when he looked back the shuttle sitting on its undercarriage looked like a black-and-white toy on a tabletop – on towards that forest, and the
mountains.
That was why he was the last to hear that, sometime during the descent when attentions were otherwise engaged, Abbey Brandenstein had stabbed Joseph Mullane in the heart with a sharpened plastic
toothbrush.
CHAPTER 10
2155
O n Angelia’s last night in the human world, Dr Kalinski cherished her. That was how she thought of it, on later reflection.
Still in the form of her weighty humanoid body, she was taken to dinner with Dr Kalinski and his daughter Stef, and members of the control crew who would care for her during her ten-year flight
to Proxima: people like Bob Develin and Monica Trant, competent twenty- or thirty-somethings, all employees of national space agencies now subsumed into a global UN agency which only the Chinese,
their Framework partners and a few outliers like North Britain had declined to join. ‘Only’: much of interplanetary space travel, in fact, was dominated by the new Chinese empire. They
spoke openly, loosely, treating Angelia as one of the crew, as
human
, sometimes even speaking as if she wasn’t there at all, which paradoxically made her feel more welcome, more
included.
But she learned more about their concerns regarding the mission than Dr Kalinski had told her about before. That perhaps it was obsolete, technologically, before it was even launched, given the
UEI kernel developments. That it wasn’t very popular politically in higher circles in the UN: it had a whiff of the Heroic Generation, whose projects had been characterised by massive,
wasteful engineering, and loaded with AIs of a quality of sentience that had later been made illegal retrospectively. After all, Dr Kalinski had grown up in the wake of the Generation and their
mighty works; maybe he was influenced by them. So the whispers went.
Dr Kalinski had done his best to shield his project from those criticisms. Yes, he had needed some big-scale equipment, but even though he had reused a solar-power station, itself a much-hated
relic of the past Heroic age with its hubristic planetary engineering schemes, he would use energies of orders of magnitude
less
than those that had hurled Dexter Cole to Proxima. As for
profit, Dr Kalinski eschewed any
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