harm.’
‘I know it will.’ It was only older people who needed reassuring about stuff like that; people of Stef’s age just assumed technology would
work
. She followed him,
watching where she was stepping. In this crater basin the surface was smoother than she had expected, with dust overlying a rocky surface pitted by lesser impacts. She moved easily enough, but felt
a little heavy, as if she was over-muscled, like she’d beefed up in a gym. The suit must have exoskeletal multipliers.
The domes of the Yeats base were big blisters piled high with dirt, for protection from meteorite falls and from the sun’s radiation. Further out there were storage facilities, backup
plants for air and water processing, dusty rovers on tracks that led off across the crater’s dirt floor. Not far from the inhabited facilities was the edge of the area of the crater floor
panelled by solar cells, a glimmering reflective surface like a pool of molten silver that stretched away for kilometres.
And further out still she glimpsed some of the mountains that ringed this walled plain, like broken, eroded teeth. Out there stood bigger facilities, marked out by winking warning lights, all
far enough from the inhabited domes to allow for safety margins. There was the broad, hardened pad where ships like her own ferry from orbit had come in to land, and fuel and energy stores, and a
long shining needle that was the mass driver, which used sun-powered electromagnetism to hurl caches of material out of Mercury’s gravity well and across the solar system. In the shadow of
the mountains themselves she saw the big gantries of the UEI’s drilling project, sinking shafts hundreds of kilometres deep through layers of lava and impact-pummelled bedrock to the edge of
Mercury’s iron mantle, where the mysterious kernels were to be found.
And there too, huddling in the shadow, stood a taller gantry, a slim rocket: a strange sight for Stef, like something out of a history book. That was mankind’s newest spacecraft, the
International-One
, waiting to take Lex and his crew off into space.
Lex took a step and stamped on the ground, sending up little sprays of dust that sank quickly back down. ‘It’s an interesting little world.’
‘So you say.’
He laughed. ‘I mean it. It’s only superficially like the moon. Look at those drill rigs over there. Here, you only have to drill down a few hundred kilometres before you reach the
mantle. You’d have to go ten times deeper into the Earth, say. You know why that is?’
‘Of course I know—’
Like her father, he didn’t always listen before lecturing her. ‘Because, we think, some big explosion on young Mercury, or maybe a big impact, blew off most of the rocky
crust.’
She tried to imagine standing here when that big impact happened. Tried and failed. ‘What I want to know is, has all that got anything to do with the formation of the kernels they found
here?’
Another voice replied, ‘Good question. Well, nobody knows. But I can see why
you
would ask it. You are Stephanie Kalinski, aren’t you?’
A woman was walking towards them from the direction of the domes, tall, a little heavy-set perhaps, yet graceful. Evidently projecting a virtual image, she appeared to be in regular clothes; she
wore a trim blue jacket and trousers, almost uniform-like, but not as showy as Lex’s ISF suit. She looked about thirty, but was oddly ageless, as if heavily cosmeticised. Her accent was
neutral, perhaps east coast American.
‘The name’s Stef,’ she replied automatically. ‘Not Stephanie. I know your face. I’ve seen your picture in my dad’s dossiers.’
‘Of course you have,’ Lex said, grinning. ‘Which is why I thought you two ought to meet. Dr Kalinski’s two daughters, so to speak. Because he never would have thought of
bringing you together himself, right?’
‘I am Angelia,’ said the woman.
That puzzled Stef. ‘That’s the name of the starship.
Nikita Storm, Bessie Hucow, Mystique Vixen