Proxima Read online

  Angelia caught the pebble easily. ‘Not a projection. Not quite an android either.’ She looked at the rock, then popped it into her mouth and swallowed it. ‘I’m not in a suit like yours.’

  ‘You’re programmable matter.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Angelia held up her left hand, and watched as it morphed into a clutch of miniature sunflowers, which swivelled their heads to the low sun.

  ‘Ugh,’ Lex said. ‘Creepy.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She turned her hand back into a hand, and pointed up at the empty sky. ‘I’m to be fired off into interstellar space, by the microwave beam from your father’s defunct solar-power satellite, up there. I’m the payload. But there is a me in here. In fact, a million mes, in a sense. A whole sisterhood, all sentient to a degree. Stef, I’m sure your father will walk you through the mission design—’

  ‘But it makes no difference.’ Lex walked around Angelia, studying her. ‘Whether you’re sentient or not, I mean. You’re not human. And it’s an authentic, physical human presence that counts when it comes to touching a new world. Sending some AI like you doesn’t count. That’s why the kernel ships are the important breakthrough here, because they can carry humans. Maybe even all the way to the stars – and back, unlike poor old Dexter Cole.’

  ‘That’s very post-Heroic Generation thinking,’ Angelia said, and she smiled indulgently. ‘A backlash against the philosophical horrors of that age. And typical of what they teach you at the ISF academies, from what I understand. Human experience is primal, yes? In fact this modern incarnate-humanism is the reason why Stef’s father programmed me into this form, so I could attend the pre-launch ceremonies in person, so to speak. It’s expected, these days.’

  Lex shook his head. ‘No offence, Angelia, but nothing you will ever do could match the achievement of Dexter Cole, no matter how his mission pans out.’

  Stef knew Cole’s story; every kid grew up hearing about it. When a habitable planet of Proxima Centauri was discovered, nations in what had since become the western UN federation had banded together, and within a couple of decades had scraped together a crewed mission. Cole had launched from Mercury for access to its energy-rich solar flux, just like Angelia would. A tremendous laser beam, powered by that flux, had blasted into a lightsail, sending Cole’s thousand-tonne ship to Proxima. Dexter Cole was flying alone to the stars on a forty-year, one-way mission – and, in some sense Stef had not been allowed to discover, he would somehow become the ‘godfather’ of a human colony when he got there. All this had been launched from an Earth still reeling from the aftermath of the climate Jolts and the Kashmir War of the previous decades, an Earth where the huge recovery projects of the Heroic Generation were still working through their lifecycles – all this as mankind was only just making its first footfalls on the worlds of its own 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

  On 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 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 forgotten you were in a starship, for long periods. Now here was the reality of the situation suddenly intruding. His latest prison really was a battered tin can light years from Earth.

  And then, not five seconds after the acceleration cut out, the riot started.

  It erupted all at once, along the length of the hull. The yelling was the first thing Yuri noticed, shouted commands, whoops, screams of defiance and fear.

  The big fluorescent light fittings were put out immediately. The crimson emergency lighting system soon came on, shining from behind toughened glass, but the hull was plunged into a flickering, shadowy half-light. And people moved through the shadows, grabbing handrails and slamming at the partition flooring with booted feet, so that broken panels started hailing down through the crowded air. Others used whatever tools they had to hand, spanners, broom handles, they even wrenched rails off the wall, to smash up equipment.

  The Peacekeepers were an early target too. Near Yuri, from nowhere, three, four, five people, men and women, came hurtling out of the air like missiles and slammed straight into Mattock. Struggling, his head surrounded by a mist of vomit and blood, the Peacekeeper had no chance of reaching his weapons. He looked to Yuri, who was clinging to the wall. ‘Help me, you bastard—’ A booted foot slammed into his mouth, silencing him.

  Yuri turned away. He pulled himself around the walls, working his way across rails and equipment banks, trying to keep out of trouble, trying not to be noticed. He had a rendezvous of his own to make.

  As he moved he observed that the hull’s population was split. Maybe a third of them were working in a coordinated way, savaging the Peacekeepers and, he saw, one or two astronaut crew members they’d got hold of, or systematically wrecking the internal equipment. Obviously they’d planned this, coordinated it for the onset of zero gravity. Most of the rest, scared, nauseous, were swarming around trying to keep out of the way of the violence. They were almost all adults, of course; the few kids, two- or three-year-olds born during the voyage, clung to their mothers in terror.

  And up at the top of the hull Yuri saw a party gathering around the central fireman’s pole, preparing to climb up to the hull’s apex, up to the bridge. A woman he recognised, called Delga, was at their head. That was no surprise. He’d known her on Mars, where they’d called her the snow queen of Eden. On the ship she had quickly built a power base in the early days when, without alcohol, drugs, tobacco, the whole hulk had been like a huge rehab facility as everybody worked through cold turkey of one kind or another – and Delga, who somehow got her hands on various narcotics, had acquired a lot of customers. Yuri had kept out of her way on Mars, and on the ship, and he did so now. He dropped his head and concentrated on his own progress.

  He got to his meeting point. It was just a kind of alcove on a central deck, a warren of thick pipes and ducts and power cables between two hefty air-scrubbing boxes. But it was tucked out of the way of trouble. He and his buddies hadn’t anticipated this scenario exactly, but they’d made contingency plans to meet here, in case.

  And now, here he found Lemmy, and Anna Vigil, and Cole, nearly four years old, a timid little boy who clung to his mother’s legs, all waiting for him.

  Wordlessly Yuri backed into the space, opened a maintenance panel on one of the scrubber boxes, took out a wrench and a screwdriver, and thus armed wedged himself in position before the others. After three and a half years he had a reputation on this hull. A loner he might be but he’d fight back, and was best left alone if there were easier targets. This had been the plan they’d cooked up, the three of them, when they’d thought ahead to bad times; this was the best Yuri could think of to protect them.

  He heard a scream. In the shadowy chaos, he saw that three men had got hold of a woman. Yuri knew them all; he’d thought one of the men at least was a friend of the woman, who’d paired off with another guy. Yuri knew the woman too; called Abbey Brandenstein, she was an ex-cop and she could look after herself, but she was being overwhelmed. Now they were dragging her into a corner, though she was still fighting back. As the screaming got worse Anna Vigil covered little Cole’s eyes and ears, and hugged him close.

  The noise was still ferocious, a clamour of yells and screams. More alarm sirens were sounding off, adding to the racket. There was no sign yet of the Peacekeepers taking any kind of coordinated action. Yuri saw Gustave Klein on the other side of the hull, flanked by a couple of his heavies, watching the action with a grin on his face. Maybe it was Klein who was really in control.

  Lemmy peered cautiously up into the apex of the hull. ‘Delga’s reached the bridge, it looks like.’

  ‘What do you think they want?’

  Lemmy shrugged. ‘To take the ship. Force the astronauts to whiz us all back to Earth. I bet there’s a similar breakout going on in the other hull; they’ll have timed it. I guess it’s the last chance we’ll get. There’ll be no hope once we’re on the ground, on a planet of Proxima.’

  ‘But they could smash up the ship before they win that argument.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘You think it’s going to work?’

  Lemmy grinned. ‘Nah. Look.’ He pointed to the far wall of the hull.

  An airlock hatch opened and a dozen astronauts tumbled out of the lock and into the hull’s cluttered spaces. They wore hard, carapace-like pressure suits of brilliant white, marked with arm stripes in gaudy recognition colours, red, blue, green. They had their helmets sealed, their faces hidden behind golden visors, and their movements were jerky, too rapid, over-definite – a product of military-class enhancements, Yuri had learned, exoskeletons, d
rugs, boosters from the cellular level up. They carried weapons of some kind, not guns, not in a pressure hull, but what might be tasers, even whips.

  Some of the rebelling inmates went for them immediately. The astronauts fought back with clean, hard moves, and snaps of their tasers, rasps of the whips. They were like insects with their superfast movements and hard outer shells, like space-monster cockroaches in this chaotic human environment. Before them the inmates looked grubby and unevolved. People fell back howling, blood spraying into the air.

  Meanwhile one group of astronauts, three, four of them, broke away and made for a big locked control panel a couple of decks higher up towards the bridge. More rebels tried to get in their way, but the astronauts were too fast, too definite, and their opponents were brushed aside. The astronauts unlocked the panel with brisk taps of gloved fingers, and plugged pull-out leads into sockets in their suits, perhaps for identity verification.

  Then, not a minute after the airlock had first opened, a yellowish gas began to vent from outlets all around the hull, and people began coughing, panicking.

  Lemmy grinned. ‘Sweet dreams. See you on Prox c . . .’

  But Yuri was already falling away down a long dark tunnel, and could hear no more.

  CHAPTER 8

  The ship’s population – what survived of it after the riots – was split up into small groups, held in isolated chambers in a newly partitioned hull.

  On being woken from his latest bout of unconsciousness, Yuri found himself cuffed with plastic strips to a metal-frame chair, itself locked to a mesh floor. He was in a small partition-walled cabin with ten others, four women, six men. They were all dressed identically, in orange jumpsuits, with no boots, just socks. This was his assigned ‘drop group’, he was told. The only one in here that Yuri knew well was Lemmy. He did soon learn that the passengers had already been assigned to these drop groups, nominally fourteen each, long before the insurrection, and now the groups had been used as the basis for the lockdown.