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refitted and put to good use . . . Oh, they sent Dexter Cole to the stars, but
what a cockamamie way to do it, a lightsail to get him out of one system and a fusion rocket to slow him down in the next. Like those old Greek ships, rowing boats with sails attached. Still, they
did it, they got him away. Now you, Angelia, you represent the next generation, the next phase of human ingenuity.
    ‘And, just at this exquisite moment –
this
. The discovery of the kernels. A source of tremendous power that, it seems, we can just turn on like a tap. Everything we mere
humans can manage is suddenly put in the shade. It’s as if we’re somehow being allowed to cheat. Does that seem
right
?’
    Stef was puzzled. ‘You’ve talked about this before. I’m not sure who you’re blaming, Dad.’
    ‘Your father has always been an agnostic,’ Angelia said. ‘Not God.’
    ‘Not God, no. I just keep thinking it’s a damn odd coincidence that we find these things just when we need them . . .’
    The murmuring voices around them seemed to synchronise, and Stef realised that, suddenly, the countdown was nearly done, the
I-One
almost ready to go. She glanced once more at Lex
McGregor, on his back, apparently utterly calm.
    Flaring light flooded the bunker.
    Stef looked through the window. The light was coming from the base of the ship, a glare like a droplet of Mercury sunlight. As she watched, that point of light lifted slowly from the ground.
    The bunker erupted in whoops and cheering.
    ‘Watch it go, Stef,’ said her father, and he took her hand in his. ‘It’s on a trial run out to Jupiter, at a constant one-G acceleration all the way. If it works that
damn drive should be visible all the way out, like a fading star. This is history in the making, love. Who knows? It might unite us as humans, at long last. Or it might trigger some terrible
conflict with the Chinese, who are denied this marvellous technology. But it’s certainly a bonfire of my own ambition.’
    Angelia put a comforting arm around his shoulders.
    Stef barely paid any attention. Staring into that ascending fire, she had only one question.
The kernels. How do they work?

 
     
     
     
CHAPTER 7
    2169
     
     
     
    Day one thousand, two hundred and ninety-seven.
    That was Yuri’s count, by the tally he had kept running in his head, recording the eight-hour shift changes since he’d woken up in the hull. Over three and a half years. There were
no calendars on the
Ad Astra
, not that the passengers saw. And of course he had slept through the early weeks of the flight from Mars, an uncountable time. But he knew roughly that the
journey was due to end about now. Day one thousand, two hundred and ninety-seven.
    When the end did come, there was some warning: a siren that wailed, for a few seconds.
    At the time Yuri had no idea what it meant; he paid no attention to the sporadic briefings on shipboard events. He was on another punishment duty, scooping out muck from the interstices of a
mesh floor partition, a grimy, demeaning job that you had to do on your hands and knees, working with a little cleanser the size of a toothbrush and a handheld vacuum hose. A make-work job a
machine could have done in a fraction of the time.
    Then the gravity failed.
    It felt like the whole hull had suddenly dropped, like an elevator car whose cable had broken. Yuri found himself drifting up in the air, the little brush and the vacuum cleaner and his sack of
dirt floating up around him. It was an extraordinary feeling, a mix of existential shock and a punch to the gut.
    The Peacekeeper supervising him, a fat man called Mattock, threw up, and the chunky vomit sprayed over Yuri’s back and drifted up into the air, a stinking, noxious, stringy cloud.
    Yuri knew what had happened, of course. After three and a half years of a steady one-gravity thrust, save for a brief turnaround at the journey’s mid-point, the crew had shut down the
drive. During the cruise you could have