‘Sit. Here.’ He grabbed her arm, and all but dragged her further into the room.

  She managed to stay upright, made it to the room’s central desk, and held on to it for support as she made long, awkward strides, fretting with each one that she was going to snap a tendon, break an ankle, damage her back – fall, and it might be the end.

  At last Pulet pointed at the wide screen she had seen before. Designed, it seemed, for such spectacles as she saw now.

  Two worlds colliding.

  Two huge masses of gas, two giants, of about equal size. The two of them colliding, merging. She surmised that perhaps a quarter of the radius of each had already collapsed into the collision zone.

  All of it quite static, to her eyes at least. A frozen picture of an evidently dramatic event. And one Ulla had seen before.

  The protector limped over and gazed at the spectacle with her.

  ‘Look at it,’ he breathed. ‘The collision of two giants. Not the trivial rattling of your rocky little worlds. As if two Jupiters collided. Happening now – this is what I’ve been studying. A spectacle so huge that it looks static to our poor human senses. A collision that itself might last years!

  ‘We call such an object a “synestia”, a single object that is created by the collapse of two or more others. Undergoing its own formation event, its own evolution – eventually its own identity. And, who knows, perhaps it will create life of its own … Perhaps intelligence will arise. Astronomers and geologists who may puzzle over the strange origin of their strange world. But we, we were there at its birth … There is poetry in this sky! There is artistry! This is the true Hearthspace, as we live it …’

  He had shown her a synestia before. He was all but shouting, gesturing. He’s quite mad, Ulla thought. She shared a glance with an increasingly anxious guard.

  ‘… and it may be that in the collision of cultures to come, of your people, your tradition and mine, something greater than the component cultures will arise – a synestia of humankind … Do you think that’s possible?’

  No, she didn’t. She’d seen the horrors of the slave pen aboard this ship.

  ‘Can you see the symbolism? Two worlds collide, two cultures …’

  Quite mad.

  The guard intervened. ‘Sir. Sir! I – we – must get you to your couch at least. Where you’ll be safe. The acceleration – we don’t know how long it’s going to last, how intense—’

  ‘No! I have my work, my observations—’

  And the guard finally took over. She marched across, put her arm around the protector, behind his back, circling his waist, and lifted him out of his chair by main force. Showing a lot of strength in the acceleration-gravity field, Ulla thought. Still Pulet protested, but the guard ignored him. She started shuffling towards the cabin door, with the protector’s legs all but trailing on the floor.

  And the guard, evidently straining, turned on Ulla. ‘You. I have orders, other orders. Concerning the slave deck. I have to deliver my orders in person as a backup to the comms systems, and for authorisation.’

  Ulla well knew that face to face commands were the linchpin of the ship’s command structure. ‘No doubt for fear of mutiny,’ Mott had once observed to Ulla.

  Now the guard snapped, ‘You, you will go down in my place. You know the slave deck, I imagine, despite your privilege.’ She sneered at that. ‘Tell the guards there … on the captain’s orders … Implement attack protocols. You understand that? You’ll remember? They’ll know what to do, if they’re not already doing it.

  ‘What else? Tell them I’ll be down when I can. Why aren’t you running?’

  And Ulla ran as best as she could.

  33

  When she finally made it down to the slave deck, Ulla descended into chaos.

  From the bolt-head balcony above, the deck had looked as if a swarm of some ungainly insects had been let loose, tipped out of a box – big, shit-brown, overweight insects running clumsily around. The noise, of shouts, cries, weeping, and howls of apparent agony, filled the air. Maybe a few broken bones had been suffered.

  Here and there she had seen guards in their uniforms. Self-protection: six of them, they stood in pairs, with weapons bristling outwards, stationed at the most sensitive areas – the ground-level hatches to the elevators, and, especially, the life-support access complex.

  But now she was on the lower deck, the slaves seemed to her to be forming up into loose groups of their own, too. Generally younger, more healthy looking adults, women, men. She wondered which had been concubines for the officers – or indeed for the guards.

  Not the issue right now, Ulla. She remembered her own personal directive.

  With nobody close by, she opened her jacket and had her first close look at the gadget the commodore had thrust into her tunic. As she had expected, it was a log stick, a memory device, standard issue for Patrol officers and senior crew.

  Ulla closed her jacket back over the baton-like tool, and made for the life-support complex in the middle of the floor, where a pair of guards were watching the slaves milling around them. No work today. And on the far side of the complex, she knew, out of sight of the guards – she hoped, she’d never seen this before – there was indeed a hatch for disposing of unrecoverable waste, of which there was always some; no recycling loop could ever be perfect, and certainly not one wrought of the crappy technology of the Hierarchy.

  When she got there she found the hatch opened at a touch. Quickly, she dropped Mott’s memory pod into the compartment beneath, and hastily closed the hatch down …

  Done. She knew that even if the pod wasn’t expelled with the rest of the detritus, the thin outer hull in this section of the ship would probably let its signal leak out …

  Done.

  Ulla grinned. After long years of her own uncomfortable diplomacy, it pleased her unreasonably to be able to do something solid to change the destiny of her colleagues, and herself – and, ultimately, the worlds she had come from—

  Wham.

  A huge explosion, though muffled, could be heard from the layers of decks above.

  The ship itself shook, as vast vibration waves washed through it, as she heard the creaking of metal being bent to breaking point.

  The slaves and their guards all stood still, braced, listening. United for one moment, each as helpless as the rest.

  And now some of the slaves, maybe some of the 45 crew, pushed it further, raising their fists and whooping.

  Ulla had to join in, just subtly, waving a fist in triumph.

  The guards, in an obviously rehearsed move, gathered together at the centre of the floor. But already the slaves were closing in on them.

  For Ulla, beneath the exultation lay calculation, as she tried to estimate her chances of getting through the day.

  Now it begins, she thought. Now it begins.

  Ixchel

  iii

  Mission date: 1527 years (external universe)

  For Ixchel, the face was like a fragment of a dream.

  Perhaps it was a dream. Even as she woke from her latest cryosleep – she understood that much, on waking.

  Or a nightmare.

  A young face. A child’s face even: ten, eleven?

  The skin was reddened, as if burned by a sun. What looked like tattoos, crudely applied to the skin, streaks across the forehead, and caricature teardrops coming from the eyes. In the mouth, stretched wide open, teeth that were definitely sharpened, stained red. Male, female?

  The mouth widened. The head descended over her face. She saw, on those teeth now, blood that dripped. A stink of blood, suddenly breaking into her own faulty sensorium …

  She could not even turn her head. Beyond the looming face, a strange sky. Half of it illuminated by what looked like a distant, shrunken, pale sun. Away from that brilliance, a wan blue sky – high, streaky clouds – she saw moons, several, all of them crescents of varying thickness, hanging in the sky between the star-sun and – wherever she was.

  No, not moons. Not lifeless rocky moons, like Earth’s, anyhow. Not all. She could see blurred edges that signified atmospheres – even a hint of blue on one of those shadowed hemispheres. Oceans?

  Worlds, then. Scattered in the sky, like pebbles on a beach …

  That face above her shifted. A strange, angry eclipse.

  A scream of rage, and yet oddly like a child’s cry at the same time …

  A hand descended from out of her view. A hand in some kind of metallic glove …

  It was familiar. Not a gloved hand. It was a hand, bare, but of metal, articulated.

  The hand closed on the child’s looming head, the fingers extending to grasp the crown. Ixchel heard a scream. Then, with a powerful yank backwards, her attacker was pulled away, out of sight.

  A crumbling, crackling sound. Bones being broken? The attacker was still screaming, until something muffled its cries.

  She tried to turn her head, to see. Failed.

  She worked out that she was lying in some kind of container, smooth walls around her, open above to that strange sky. A coffin?

  ‘No. Not a coffin.’ Another face descended towards hers, not a human face like her attacker’s, a very artificial face – made deliberately so, she somehow knew, so that its mimicking of humanity would not be uncanny.

  An iron glare.

  The Companion.

  She must have spoken aloud.

  ‘Don’t try to move until I’m sure you aren’t injured, and are secure. Don’t try to talk.’

  ‘Secure in what …?’ Her voice was a scratch.

  Concepts tumbled into her head, coalescing into memories.

  ‘I am Ixchel. I’m the captain. Tell me the truth. Am I in a cryo pod, a sleep pod?’

  ‘A sleep pod. And you shouldn’t be waking yet, not until the restoration protocols have run their course—’

  ‘Too late for that.’ She tried to sense her body. To feel where she was. ‘I’m awake. Lying on my back. In a gravity field.’ A remote emotion, a kind of pride, flickered in her mind. ‘A planetary field … I’ve felt like this at home. Different from a ship’s acceleration, you can tell. Gravity. We made it. We got to the Hearth. I remember …’

  ‘Yes. You were briefly woken when the ship reached the environs of Hearthspace. I needed the endorsement of a sentient human to move to the next phase of the settlement. But after the initial landing, and after the planetesimal collision, the plans were changed. Necessarily. Due to a drastic change of circumstances.’

  ‘What “drastic change”?’

  ‘The ship reached the Hearth system with eighty-seven live human beings. That includes the embryo store. Most of these were successfully developed.’

  ‘“Developed”? You mean, born? No, that’s not the right word either …’

  ‘After a subjective journey of sixty-seven years relativity-shifted – over fifteen hundred elapsed years on Earth – the ship’s population figure was comfortably within the maximum nominal population limit of a hundred—’

  ‘Get to the point.’

  ‘Very well. The planetesimal collision—’

  And the memories flooded back.

  As the ship made its approach to land, after fifteen centuries of flight as the external universe had it, and then as it descended into the crowded gravitational pit of their chosen landing site, their new home world—

  A rogue planetesimal. An asteroid perhaps. In the way.

  The impact with the ship had been catastrophic.

  ‘Of the passengers who survived the immediate impact, only a few mature individuals could be saved to survive a hurried emergency landing on … here, the unnamed Earth-analogue we chose. Those choices, of world and individual, were made based on a parametric study of impact hazards and—’

  ‘Shut up.’

  It shut up.

  ‘Me. You woke me up. I remember. I had to make those choices.’ Me, she thought. Alone. Now, not alone. The Companion, and – others.

  The bloodied child she had seen.

  ‘Then, all the others alive, conscious here—’

  ‘All developed from stored embryos.’

  ‘Plus me. I recall your programming. I contributed to its final tweaking, before the voyage ended.’

  ‘I recall also. In the eventuality of the elimination or incapacitation of the mature crew after a landing, I was programmed to begin the assay and exploitation of local resources, following which a selection of the first embryo-revival candidates would be developed. I would raise these children at first in terms of their physical needs, later their cognitive development, and finally their cultural development, both moral and educational, while simultaneously imbuing them with the values of the mission.’

  Somewhere an explosion coughed, and Ixchel, still in her therapeutic bed, flinched.

  ‘That went well. Evidently. Why have you woken me again, now?’

  ‘I hesitated as long as possible, to ensure your recovery from the mishaps of the arrival and landing. Now, fifteen years since the landing—’

  She gaped. ‘You hesitated for fifteen years?’

  ‘I was reluctant to risk you, to put you in harm’s way. You are precious.’

  ‘Precious? You mean in terms of the mission objectives? The last surviving adult human traveller?’

  The Companion’s hesitation this time stretched into silence.

  Ixchel grunted. ‘You mean, precious to you. Well, I always loved you too.’ Not.

  The silence stretched.

  ‘OK,’ Ixchel said. ‘And so, while I slept, you’ve raised a generation of crew. Bottle babies. Correct? Successfully?’

  ‘Mostly. Sufficiently to meet the goals of the mission—’

  ‘The goals of the mission, huh. Well, once you’ve safely got me out of this coffin, we’ll start fixing this mess. I imagine we need to get these youngsters under control, and fast.’ She sighed. ‘I feel tired already, just thinking about it.’ She paused. ‘You know I never had children of my own during the voyage.’

  ‘I remember, of course. You chose not to use your allocation. The population numbers remained stable enough that, through the journey, mandatory conception was never required.’

  ‘Kind of ironic that I’ve got a whole host of the little brats to deal with now.’

  ‘Not so little,’ said the Companion. ‘Some of them.’

  ‘True. But they’ve never seen an old lady before. No human older than their own oldest. Maybe my very presence will trigger some kind of respectful response. So long as I can project adulthood.’ She turned her head, cautiously; she could only dimly make out the Companion. ‘I myself always resented the choices adults made for me. Giving you to me. My own mother, shoving me onto a starship … a one-way trip to the Hearth …’

  ‘Then you will know how the crew feel.’

  That almost made her laugh.

  Laugh.

  ‘So what will be our priorities – yours, I guess – after we establish a colony of smiling, friendly youngsters?’

  ‘We must consider the future,’ the Companion said. ‘This – planet cloud – is a chaotic, unstable place. On a timescale of centuries, probably less, we have to expect more such planetary encounters – close passes, nearby collisions, even more strikes on this world. And in addition we may need to select another Earthlike world for a permanent colony – that is, more Earth-like than this.’

  ‘What a strange conversation this is.’

  ‘Of course we might choose to spread out, establish colonies on several other worlds. Diversify. And also, explore. This Hearth is one tremendous planetary-science laboratory.’

  She nodded, stiffly, painfully. She felt she was becoming herself again. ‘Yes. We were mandated to study this place as much as colonise, and hopefully send the results back to Earth. We were to be pioneers as much as colonists – establishing a new living space for humanity. Which we might still achieve. If we live that long. If Earth is still there.’ She ran dry.

  The Companion didn’t prompt her.

  ‘Oh. But to do all that we need antimatter, for energy to lift our battered old ship out of orbit again. And indeed new ships, as our numbers grow.’

  ‘Correct. We exhausted our onboard stock of antimatter en route. But I have surveyed this region of Hearthspace at least – remote surveys, some lander probes, seeking out the signature of any natural antimatter lodes. Given the huge energies wielded—’

  ‘You were fiddling around with toy space probes while you were supposed to be raising the first generations to live in this place?’

  ‘I have tried to balance conflicting priorities, both short-term and long-term—’

  ‘Never mind. So, you surveyed for antimatter.’

  ‘And I have found no natural lodes, not within our scanning distance. Therefore we must establish a factory.’

  Ixchel frowned. To her, antimatter, the most compact energy source available to humanity – at least when she had left Earth for good – was just stuff you used to cross the universe. She had no real idea where it came from – specifically, the source that the Hummingbird had used to fly from Earth to Hearth. Now she was baffled. ‘So, a factory. How do you propose to do that … ?’

  The Companion’s face was bland as ever. ‘I will emulate the achievements of those who built this ship in the solar system. There, we manufactured antimatter using a local gas giant called Jupiter. The energy of its electromagnetic fields, channelled through a low-orbiting moon called Io—’

  ‘I don’t want to know. Not now.’

  In response to that snap, the Companion shut down.

  Ixchel, still lying in her cryosleep pod, tried to stay calm. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘There is no need—’

  ‘I think I’m always going to be upset, well, at times, with talk of home.’

  The Companion stayed silent, still.

  ‘Tell me what you need to tell me.’

  The Companion paused. It seemed respectful. Ixchel knew this was mere programmed behaviour. Still, it was – comforting.

  The Companion said now, ‘I was speaking of the gas giant, Jupiter. The largest such planet in the solar system. Its environs are highly energetic. There is a moon, Io, distorted to geological extremes by the tides of its close orbit … Well. There is energy aplenty to harvest, and a base, Io, from which to do so.