As the shuttle drifted away from the Cronus, a drone, a floating tray, came sailing through the air past their heads, laden with food and drink packages.

  Doria grinned. ‘You can’t fault the service. Or the automatics. Anybody want anything?’

  But Salma was staring around, at the four of them – plus Feathers – gathered together for the first time.

  Doria noticed, and approached Salma, feeling faintly concerned. ‘Salma? Something wrong?’

  Salma looked back at her, vaguely.

  Meriel touched her arm. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Salma seemed to focus. ‘Yes, yes … it’s just – our pendants. She touched her own onyx pendant.

  And the four exchanged glances, Salma, Meriel, Vasta, Doria.

  Doria was the first, nervously, to speak. ‘Look at the four of us. We come from across human space, gathered here like this, by chance …’

  ‘Apparent chance,’ Vasta murmured.

  And yet, the coincidence of these pendants …’ Doria shook her head. ‘I was born and raised on the Moon. Elizabeth on Earth, you others – Salma was born half way to the Oort cloud. And yet we all have these similar pendants.’

  Meriel touched her own pendant. ‘The only non-coincidence is Salma and myself sharing gifts from her mother. Otherwise—’

  Vasta smiled. ‘Otherwise we’re evidently dealing with forces we don’t understand. From galaxy-centre explosions to costume jewellery. What next?’

  Salma said, ‘It must mean something.’

  Vasta nodded. ‘So it must. But that meaning will become clear in time, I’m sure. All we can do is explore it all, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.’ She stroked Salma’s arm. ‘For now, just be glad we’re underway. Time for a nap in these cosy surroundings, I think.’ She settled back. ‘Wake me if you need to.’

  There was no need.

  The flight seemed to pass quickly. Salma, holding Feathers in a light embrace, found she had dozed as well. And when she was woken, by Doria rousing them all with a noisy throat-clearing, she was surprised to find there was just a quarter of an hour before landing.

  They settled in their couches quickly.

  Doria called, ‘Touchdown approaching. Check your straps …’

  No air, no re-entry. No buffeting weather. No signals from the ground …

  And so they landed.

  After touchdown it didn’t take long for the party to suit up, debark, and have the automatics disgorge their equipment. Crew and drones together dragged it all on trolleys a safe distance away from the shuttle.

  Then the shuttle, self-piloting, lofted silently back to space.

  So the party were left behind.

  For a moment, they just stood in a circle around their heaps of gear, including a collapsed habitat module, tanks of air and water, heavy resource-recycling kits, a small fission-powered generator. After the brilliantly lit cabins of the Cronus it all seemed terribly dim to Salma. But under her feet the odd, dustless, roughened surface of Nine was hugely familiar. I’m back …

  Meriel insisted that they got the shelter set up first, sealed and pressurised, with some of their gear stowed inside. ‘Ready for a medical emergency,’ she said.

  The others weren’t about to argue, and got to work.

  ‘This heap of gear doesn’t seem like much to take on an adventure like this, does it?’ Vasta said as they worked, as if lightening the mood.

  ‘It’s enough,’ Meriel said calmly. She glanced at checklists, then at Salma, Feathers. ‘For us, after all this time, it’s like coming home. And we didn’t have such a nifty power unit before.’ A gift from Cronus.

  ‘Nothing but the best,’ Doria said. ‘And now …’

  With the habitat hastily assembled, they stood together, distracted, looking around.

  Doria was hesitating. ‘You know the schedule says we ought to check out the rest of our kit. Before calling down the Hawking signal.’

  Meriel nodded. ‘But the kit’s pretty smart. It would bleat if it was hurting. Also I can attest we are all fit and well. Somewhat accelerated heartbeats and breathing, in some cases. Oh, and Feathers is fine too, as far as I can tell …’

  Doria glanced around at the group, standing in their pressure suits. ‘You want to just get this done?’

  Vasta, her face, like the others’, illuminated by an interior helmet lamp, just smiled. ‘I was thinking the same thing.’

  ‘Then we do it.’ Doria tilted her head. ‘Bohm to Cronus, surface to Cronus. Joe, that you? I’m guessing you know what I’m about to say.’

  Salma couldn’t hear the reply from Joe the comms guy, but Doria laughed.

  Then she turned back to the group. ‘Done. He’s counting me down to the switch-on of the Hawking echo pod. Eleven. Ten …’

  Apparently on impulse, she held out her gloved hands, to either side. Salma took one, Meriel the other. They all joined in, standing in a ring – even Feathers, with a little encouragement from Salma, holding hands with Salma, Doria.

  ‘… Three. Two. One.’

  And—

  Elsewhere,

  Elsewhen

  33

  And brilliant light flooded over them all.

  Feathers screeched.

  Salma staggered, and reflexively raised her suited arm over her head. Her faceplate quickly cut down the intensity of light it allowed to pass, and her vision cleared, though she was left blinking.

  The light was all around, dazzling.

  Coming from a complex, shining sky—

  Somebody ran into her, nearly pushing her over, then clung to her. It was Feathers. Her screeching yells nearly drowned out other voices.

  But now Salma heard Vasta, calm, measured. ‘Take it easy. Fix your faceplate filters … It’s just starlight. I think. Bright starlight …’

  Salma managed to get one hand free of Feathers, and with a finger stroked the side of her own smart faceplate. It darkened quickly – too quickly, and she had to dial the opacity back, to get a light level she could withstand.

  Working partly by feel, she did the same for Feathers, who still clung to her in the glare, trembling.

  Dazzling light. Starlight?

  ‘Stand still,’ Vasta said. ‘Take your time. I think the gravity is a little different too. For now we just need to … observe.’

  But her voice sounded choked-up, to Salma. As if she was trying to conceal awe.

  Different gravity?

  Still, Salma did as she was told. She gently pushed Feathers away, but kept hold of her hand. And stood there, and looked: looked at her companions, at the lander, their modest shelter, at their bits of equipment on the ground.

  And, finally, looked into a sky that was dominated by a fist of light.

  A fist clutching what looked like a kind of sword, a sword of swirling gases and more brilliant light … She was dazzled, it was hard to see anything clearly, but that was her first impression. Her head’s first attempt to make sense of it all, she supposed. She touched her faceplate, stopping down the intensity further.

  Now, looking again more comfortably, more carefully, she saw a knot of extraordinary brilliance, like a star – but not the diminished, distant Sun as seen from the Oort cloud, nor the more remote stars – a brilliant, blazing grain of light.

  And around that vivid starlike point, a huge celestial light sculpture loomed, with billowing gases lit from within, by a frozen cascade of lesser stars – some showing blurred discs. A storm of light, it was like an explosion but so vast and slow it appeared motionless, like a still image in a monitor – a process, she supposed, working out on much vaster timescales than her own human span. That brilliant centre must be birthing those lesser stars, she thought. Stars like raindrops in a storm cloud.

  And beyond that a curtain of still more stars, distant stars, bright themselves, all set against a wider background of swirls of light, trails of glowing gas. As if a galaxy had been dismembered by some predator, the scraps thrown around …

  All of this was like a frozen explosion.

  She was aware that Feathers was still clinging to her, tight, and yet not trembling now, not afraid.

  Suddenly the light was blocked, and Salma flinched.

  It was only Doria, standing in front of her, blocking the light. Salma, distracted by Feathers, hypnotised by the sky, hadn’t seen her approach.

  Doria peered into Salma’s faceplate. ‘I’m checking everybody. You OK?’

  ‘Just.’

  ‘Good. It’s just a different place, is all.’

  ‘A very different place—’

  ‘A different sky, but nothing that can harm us – well, I don’t think so. As Elizabeth said, gravity is different, though.’

  Salma hadn’t noticed. But then she hadn’t moved from the spot.

  When Doria moved out of her view, going on to Vasta, Salma tried a couple of steps herself. Yes, the gravity was subtly different, a fraction lighter than Nine had been. You could feel it, just with a few steps.

  Feathers followed. She still held Salma’s arm, but she was calming all the time, though looking around wildly, intermittently gabbling out some more of that strange speech. Absently, Salma stroked her back.

  And she looked across at the others: Doria inspecting Vasta now, Meriel alone, standing staring at the new sky.

  Feathers, evidently calming, at last let go of Salma. She began to walk, cautiously.

  And then to run – slowly at first, faster and faster, until it became an almost joyous sprinting, jumping, kicking up the dust.

  Dust?

  Salma looked down at her own feet, her boots. She saw that dust, dark grey, powdery, clung to the legs of her suit.

  ‘Look down,’ she called to the others.

  Meriel was still gazing up at the sky. ‘Look down? Are you kidding?’

  But Vasta looked, and glanced over at Salma. ‘Oh. No dust on Planet Nine, right? Dust here. And, yes, there’s the different gravity.’

  Salma said, ‘Also there’s Feathers.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She seems different here. I mean, in her reactions. She seems excited – but more at home. Does that make sense?’

  Meriel nodded. ‘I trust your intuition.’ She stole another glance up at the sky. ‘What a firework display. Where the hell are we? Well, we’ve got the President’s science adviser waiting to work on that. Come on. We’ve been inspected. Help me with the geology package.’

  The geology kit was a compact little unit that stood on top of a slim pillar, about the width of Salma’s bare arm. It wasn’t hard for Salma and Meriel to haul this thing out of their heap of gear, walk it away from their arrival site, and set it up on an area not yet disturbed by their footsteps. Here, they let the kit’s central smart pillar contact the ground – and, with a soft whir, it began to drill its way into the surface, sampling dust and rock, measuring such factors as humidity, heat flow, elemental composition as it went.

  For Salma the simple, well-rehearsed chore of putting this together was oddly comforting, among all the strangeness.

  Once the kit had started to work, Salma looked around at her companions.

  Doria and Vasta were staring up at the sky, evidently talking on some private channel. Vasta was pointing at the biggest, brightest of the starlike objects, that knot of energy at the heart of the ragged galaxy – if it was a galaxy.

  Feathers was still running around, Salma saw. She wasn’t frightened, not if Salma read her body language correctly, and she was pretty confident of that after all this time. She really did seem at home in this gravity field, more so than on Nine.

  But Feathers seemed to be looking for something – and yet ‘looking’ wasn’t quite the right word. She peered at the ground, yes, but she seemed to be feeling it, somehow, perhaps through the soles of her feet, her boots. A sense of the ground itself, even – maybe she was responding to its deeper structure, perhaps a faint seismic trembling, sensing the tremors like the seismometers in the geology pack.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing immediately,’ Meriel said softly to Salma. ‘This is a proper planet. Whatever it is, it’s not some manifestation of Nine again. Well, I don’t think so. But it isn’t like Earth. Or any planet in the Solar System, past or present.’

  That qualification puzzled Salma. ‘How can you tell that?’

  Meriel waved a hand at the geology pack, at preliminary readings and analyses scrolling across its face. ‘It’s amazing how much you can detect using a smart little pack like this, sitting on a planet’s surface, and how quickly. Superficially this is like Earth. Similar size and mass. Composition, metals and carbon and silicon … Gravity gradients and seismic echoes are telling me that the planet has a dense core, probably iron, a mantle of rock over the top of that, and a solid crust on top of that. Like Earth in that way. Different densities at different depths. The surface rocks are rich in silicates – silicon compounds – with iron and other metals you find on Earth. Whereas the blown-up Planet Nine was uniform throughout, so the seismometers told us. More like a model of a planet, a mock-up, than a product of geology.’

  Salma was impressed. ‘You got all that so quickly?’

  Meriel smiled. ‘I told you. Smart kit. Vasta and Doria have feeds of the results; they’re seeing what I’m seeing.’ She gestured at the geology package. ‘If you want to see for yourself—’

  ‘I’d never understand it. Just tell me, please.’

  ‘Well, you’ve had the headlines. This place is very Earthlike – oh, but very little surface water. None in the atmosphere. There may be caches underground, hydrated compounds in the mantle. Water chemically bonded with other stuff. But if there was any surface water, it’s probably long sublimated away by now. As for life—’ She glanced up at the gaudy sky. ‘That big quasar thing – there must be a hell of a lot of ultra-violet in that light show—’

  ‘True enough,’ Vasta called over, evidently listening in. ‘And any water would be long gone, dissociated into oxygen and hydrogen, the hydrogen lost to space. Just as once happened to Venus, and as will happen to the Earth in the future when the Sun heats up. If the quasar spares us, that is. However rich its past, this is an old, dead world.’

  Salma frowned. ‘Old? I don’t see how you can say it’s old. I mean, look at that sky. All those hot young stars—’

  Vasta raised a finger. ‘Well, they look young—’

  ‘Maybe the planet’s just been scorched bare.’

  Meriel shook her head. ‘It’s nothing to do with the sky, or the surface. The intrinsic properties of the planet itself – the deep structure gives it away. I should have shown you before.’ She tapped at the screen of the geology pack. ‘You know that a planet like Earth has a lot of internal heat? Some of it a relic of its formation, when you had planetesimals – lumps of rock, even some partly formed planets themselves – slamming against each other and into the growing Earth. At least some of all that kinetic energy was retained, the heat of formation, still leaking out in human times, billions of years later. And also you would have radioactive products trapped in the mantle and core, fissioning away, dumping still more heat into the interior. In our time, there was still enough residual heat from all those sources to drive surface processes—’

  ‘Volcanoes?’

  ‘That, yes. Earthquakes. Also continental drift, rafts of granite floating on currents of liquid rock in the mantle. But all the time that heat was being lost to space, and there was only ever a finite amount of it.’

  ‘The Earth was cooling, then.’

  ‘Like every rocky planet. But still it has a liquid core, a liquid mantle. That’s how hot it was, is. But here—’ She pointed to a reading. ‘Can you interpret that?’

  A learning opportunity. She would always be the only kid on the Shadow.

  She looked, gamely. If the gear had been from Shadow she might have had a chance, but this was Cronus tech. She stood back and shrugged.

  ‘OK,’ Meriel said. ‘That little number, just there, is telling me that there is only the slightest dribble of heat flow coming from this little planet. It’s almost down to ambient. I mean, the same temperature as the sky.’

  Salma understood most of that. ‘So what does that mean?’

  ‘It can only mean that this is a very old planet – very, very old. Old enough to have lost almost all its heat of formation. So Earth’s core and mantle are so hot they are still liquid, but those structures are solidified here. Our Earth is around four billion years old. I’d say that this world must be at least a hundred billion years old. Twenty, thirty times as old as Earth—’

  ‘Wow,’ Doria called over. ‘But I’ve got an objection to that. A hundred billion years – that’s, what, seven, eight times the age of the universe!’

  Vasta came over now. ‘I heard all that.’ She tapped her helmet.

  Doria said, ‘Then I apologise for shooting my mouth off. Look, I’m just a bus driver here. Meriel is the local tour guide, while Elizabeth is Earth’s top scientist—’

  ‘No, I just have the awesome power to summon Earth’s top scientists.’

  ‘—but I’m getting increasingly confused. I mean, you’re talking about this very ancient planet. Older than our universe, which is a big enough pill to swallow – even though we already thought that Feathers must come from a universe bigger and older than ours. But look at that.’ She pointed at the sky.

  Salma followed Doria’s gesture, looked again at the complex light show in the sky: the torn gas clouds, the blazing stars.

  ‘It doesn’t get any less gaudy, does it?’ Doria said. ‘It’s surely some kind of star creation event. And that is surely not the sky of an old universe.’