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solar system. Incredibly, having been launched decades before Stef was born, Cole was
still en route; right now he was in cryo, dreaming his way between the stars, before a pulse-fusion rocket would slow him at the target.
    Lex said, ‘Cole is a hero, and I intend to follow in his footsteps, some day.’
    Angelia smiled again. ‘Hey, it’s a big universe. There’s room in it for both of us, I figure.’
    Lex grinned. ‘Fair enough. Good luck, Angelia.’ He stuck out a hand.
    She approached him and took his hand. And as Stef watched the bit of stone Angelia had swallowed popped out of the back of her neck, and dropped slowly to the ground.

 
     
     
     
CHAPTER 6
     
     
     
     
    O n the day the
I-One
was to be launched, Stef stood with her father at the window of the UN-UEI command bunker.
    This stout building, constructed of blocks of Mercurian basalt, was set high in the walls of Yeats’s rim mountains, and looked down on the crater-floor plain. The big room was filled with
the mutter of voices and the glow of monitor screens, teams of engineers tracking the countdown as it proceeded. Through the bunker windows, in the low light of the sun, Stef could see the domes,
lights and tracks of the main Yeats settlement, and in the foreground the complex activity around the
International-One
at its launch stand, bathed in floodlights. The slim prow of the
ship itself just caught the sun as it rose, agonisingly slowly, above the rim mountains. The ship was so far away it looked like a toy, a model layout; the VIPs in here were using binoculars to see
better, ostentatiously demonstrating that they lacked Heroic Generation-type ocular augmentation, now deeply unfashionable.
    Supposedly, the launch pad was far enough away for them to be safe here in this bunker if the worst came to the worst. But Stef had learned by now that although the engineers had figured out how
to manipulate the kernels, which were evidently some kind of caches of high-density energy, nobody understood them. And if something went wrong,
nobody knew
what the consequences might be.
This robust bunker might turn out to be no more protection than the paper walls of a traditional Japanese house before the fury of the Hiroshima bomb.
    And somewhere in the middle of all the potentially lethal activity down there was Lex McGregor, just seventeen years old. Stef saw his face on a monitor screen. He lay on his back like his older
companions, calm, apparently relaxed, contributing to the final countdown checks.
    ‘He looks like John Glenn on the pad,’ her father said, looking over her shoulder. ‘Heroic images from the best part of two hundred years ago. Some things don’t change.
My word, he’s brave.’
    Maybe, Stef thought. She did admire Lex, but there was something slightly odd about him. Off-key. Sometimes she suspected he’d had some kind of augmentation himself, so his reactions
weren’t quite the human norm. Or maybe it was just that he was too young to be scared, even if he was six years older than she was.
    Her father said now, ‘This landscape has been sleeping for billions of years, since the last of the great planet-shaping impacts. If that damn ship works this crater is going to be witness
to fires fiercer than any that created it. And if it fails—’
    ‘It should not fail,’ Angelia said. The strange ship-woman stood on her father’s other side – one ship watching the launch of another, Stef reflected. ‘The testing
has been thorough.’
    Stef’s father grunted, sounding moody. He was in his fifties, a thickset, greying man, with old-fashioned spectacles and a ragged moustache; he had always been an
old
father to
Stef, though her French mother had been much younger. Now the low light cast by the display screens in the bunker deepened the lines of his face. He said, ‘Somewhere up there, you know, is my
SPS. An old solar-power station hauled out from Earth, a brute of an engine left over from the Heroic days and now