Proxima (2 page)

Liu Tao listened, his face neutral.

Yuri asked, ‘So how did you end up here?’

‘Bad luck. I was piloting a shuttle down from Red Two, that’s one of our orbital stations, heading for our supply depots and manufactories in the Phaethontis quadrangle, when we had
an auxiliary power-unit failure. We had to bail out at high altitude, my buddy and I, which is no joke on Mars. He got down safely – well, I guess so, I was never told. My clamshell, my heat
shield, had a crack. I was lucky to live through it. But I came down near Eden, and a couple of your Peacekeepers were the first to get to me.

‘They held on to me, in defiance of various treaties. I was put through a lot of “questioning”.’ He let that word hang. ‘They wanted me to tell them the inner
secrets of the Triangle. You know about that? The big trade loop we’re developing, Earth to asteroids and Mars and back. But I’m a Mars-orbit shuttle jock, that’s all. By
Mao’s balls, it’s not as if we’re spying on you guys at Eden!’ He laughed at that idea. ‘Well, they kept me in there, and I started to think they were never going to
let me go, I mean maybe they’d told my chain of command they’d found me dead, or something. What were they going to do to me, kill me? I guess it’s no surprise that they threw me
into the sweep and locked me up in this hull, right? Out of sight, out of mind. But we’re all prisoners here . . .’

‘Nobody’s a prisoner,’ said Dr Poinar, bustling down the ward with a tray of colourful pills. ‘That’s what the policy says, so it must be true, right? Now take
this, Yuri Eden, you need more sleep.’

Confused, as weak as Anna’s baby, yet still elated at the basic fact that
he’d come home
, even if he was stuck in this ‘hull’, Yuri obediently took his tablet
and subsided into a deep dreamless sleep.

A
fter a day of cautious bending, stretching, walking, and using a lavatory unaided, Yuri was told by Dr Poinar that his time was up. ‘We need
your bed. Sorry, buddy. You’ll be assigned a bunk later. Any possessions you had—’

Yuri shrugged.

‘Right now you’re late for a class.’

‘What class?’

‘Orientation 101,’ Liu Tao said. ‘Some astronaut showing us pretty pictures.’ He laughed, though he winced when he opened his bruised mouth wide.

‘You’re in the same class, Liu. Why don’t you show your new best friend the way?’ Poinar dumped heaps of basic clothing on their beds, bright orange, and walked away.

Yuri had thought the medical ward was crowded, noisy. But once Liu led him outside, into a space that struck Yuri at first glance as like the inside of a big metal tower, he realised that the
ward had been a haven of peace and harmony. Looking up he saw that the tower wasn’t that tall, maybe forty, forty-five metres, and was capped off by a big metal dome. It was split into
storeys by mesh-partition flooring; there were ladders and a kind of spiral staircase around the wall, and a fireman’s pole arrangement that threaded through gaps in the partitions along the
tower’s axis. The walls were crusted with equipment boxes and stores, but in some places he saw tables and chairs, lightweight fold-out affairs, and enclosures, partitions inside which he
could see bunk beds, more fold-outs. There were folk in there evidently trying to sleep; he had no idea how they’d manage that. It looked like sleep was going to be a luxury here, just like
on Mars.

And in this tank, people swarmed everywhere, most of them dressed like Yuri and Liu in bright orange jumpsuits, a few others in Peacekeeper blue, or a more exotic black and silver. They were all
adults that he could see, no kids, no infants. Their voices echoed from the metal surfaces in a jangling racket. And over all that there was a whir of pumps and fans, of air conditioning and
plumbing of some kind, just like in Eden. Like he was in another sealed unit.

Liu, moving cautiously himself – evidently it hadn’t been just his face that had taken the beating – took Yuri to that outer staircase, steps fixed to the curving wall with a
safety rail, and led him up.

At least, just like on Mars, Yuri didn’t find the
stuff
here hard. Since his first waking, he’d found twenty-second-century technology easy to work. User interfaces seemed
to have settled down to common standards some time before he’d been frozen. Even the language had stabilised, more or less, if not the accents; English was spoken across several worlds now
and had to stay comprehensible to everybody, and there was a huge mass of recorded culture, all of which tended to keep the language static. The vehicles and vocabularies of the year 2166 were
easy. It was the people he couldn’t figure out. And now Yuri climbed through a blizzard of faces, none of them familiar.

He looked for a window. He still had no idea where on Earth he was. And why the enclosure? Maybe he was in some mid-latitude climate refuge; he’d heard that since his day the whole middle
belt of the Earth had heated up, dried out and been abandoned. He could be anywhere. But that steady pull of gravity was reassuring, even as he laboured up the stairs with his Mars-softened
muscles. He wondered when his first physio was going to be.

They reached a space enclosed by movable partition panels, with fold-out chairs set in rows like a lecture theatre. Some guy in a uniform of black and silver stood at the front, facing away from
the dozen or so people in the room, talking through a series of images, star fields and space satellites.

A woman in a similar uniform, standing at the door with a slate, stopped Liu and Yuri as they entered. Yuri read her name tag: ISF LT MARDINA JONES. Maybe thirty, she was very dark, with tightly
curled black hair. ‘You’re late,’ she said.

‘Sorry. Just out of medical.’ Liu gave their names.

‘Name tags?’

Liu dug his out of a pocket and showed it to her; she scanned it with her slate. She turned to Yuri. ‘You?’

Yuri just shrugged.

Liu said, ‘Like I said, just out of medical.’

‘Just awake, huh.’ Jones shook her head and made a note on her slate. ‘Typical. Make sure you sort it out later.’ She had a thick Australian accent. ‘Sit,
you’re late.’

Finding a seat in the semi-darkened little theatre turned out to be a problem. Three guys sat together on a row of a dozen otherwise empty seats. When Yuri went to sit down in the row Liu
prodded him in the back. ‘Move on,’ he whispered.

Yuri had been quick to anger ever since he’d first woken up on Mars. ‘Why should I?’

‘Because that middle guy is Gustave Klein. Wait until you’re beefed up before you take him on.’

But it was already too late, Yuri realised. Klein was white, maybe fifty years old, hefty if not overweight, head elaborately shaven. His fists, resting on his knees, were like steam hammers.
And Yuri had made eye contact with him. He barely noticed the two guys with Klein, typical attack dogs. Klein leered at Liu, taking in his injuries, and looked away, dismissive.

They moved on, cautious in the dark. ‘What’s so special about him?’

‘He was the best Sabatier-furnace engineer in his colony,’ Liu whispered. ‘That’s part of the recycling system – you know that, right? And he fixed it so that
nobody else could touch those systems. He was a damn water king. No wonder they shipped him out. And it looks like he’s fixing to get the same hold here.’

‘A water king.’ Yuri grinned. ‘Until it rains, right?’

Liu looked at him strangely.

Somebody hissed. ‘Yuri! Hey, Yuri! Over here!’ A skinny, shambling form hustled along a row, clearing two spaces, to muttered complaints from the people behind.

‘Lemmy?’ It was the first familiar voice he’d heard since waking in the can. Yuri sat beside him, followed by Liu.

‘Awake at last, huh?’ Lemmy’s whisper was soft, practised. ‘That bastard Tollemache really shot you up, didn’t he? Well, he got what he deserved.’

Yuri tried to figure it out. Lemmy Pink, nineteen years old, had been the nearest thing to a friend Yuri had made on Mars. Even if Lemmy was only looking for protection.

The last Yuri remembered of Mars was that he and Lemmy had busted out of their dome. Yuri had had to get out. Every atom in his body longed to be out there on the Martian ground, frozen,
ultraviolet-blasted desert though it might be. He’d been taken through spacesuit and airlock drills for the sake of emergency training, but he’d never been outside. Mostly he never even
got to look through a window. So they’d stolen a rover, made a run for the hills, a local feature called the Chaos – flipped the truck, been picked up by the Peacekeepers. He remembered
Tollemache.
You’re the ice boy, right? Nothing but a pain in the butt since they defrosted you. Well, you won’t be my problem much longer
. And with a gloved fist he had jammed
a needle into Yuri’s neck, and the red-brown Martian light had folded away . . .

And he’d woken up in this tank.

‘What do you mean, he got what he deserved?’

‘He’s here too. In the hull. Ha! He got what was coming to him, all right. But it was because he didn’t stop us pinching that rover in the first place, rather than what he did
to you.’

Yuri mock-punched his arm. ‘Good to see they brought you home too, man.’

Lemmy flinched back. ‘Don’t touch me. I’m full of the fucking sniffles that are going around this coffin, typical of me to get them all.’

‘What about Krafft?’ Lemmy’s pet rat, back in the dome.

Lemmy’s face fell. ‘Well, they took him off me. What would you expect?’

‘I’m sorry.’

They were disturbing the astronaut type giving his lecture. Mardina Jones was right behind them, her voice a severe murmur. ‘If you two buttheads don’t shut up and listen to Major
McGregor I’ll put you on a charge.’

They shut up. But when she withdrew, Lemmy was staring at Yuri, in the shadowy dark. ‘What was that you just said?’

‘What? About the rat?’

‘No. Something about them bringing us home.’

‘I don’t know, man. I don’t know if I’m asleep or awake.’ But Lemmy kept staring at him.

Yuri, disoriented, confused, distracted by the noise of the crowds just half a metre beyond the partition, looked up at the astronaut at the lectern in his glittering black-as-night uniform. On
Mars everybody had hated the astronauts, because they were rotated, they got to go home. Yuri tried to concentrate on what he was saying.

‘Even a single pixel from these very early images of the new world told the astronomers a great deal. Spectral analysis revealed an atmosphere with free oxygen, methane, nitrous
oxide.’

Major McGregor, maybe late twenties, was tall, upright, whip-thin but athletic, with a healthy glow to his cheeks in the light of the images he showed. He had a slick Angleterre accent, and his
hair, blond, brushed, oiled, looked like it got more care than most of the people in this facility.

‘Oxygen, think of that! Suddenly we had a habitable world, right on our doorstep. All of you have had experience of the colonies on Mars and the moon – bleak, inhospitable worlds,
and yet the best the solar system has to offer. And now, suddenly,
this.

‘With time, variations of brightness and spectral content told us something about the distribution of continents and oceans. More subtle variations had to reflect changing weather. Not
only that, the presence of oxygen is a strong indicator of life, I mean native life, because something has to be putting all that oxygen in the air.’ He displayed graphs, wriggling lines.
‘This prominent feature in the red part of the spectrum indicated the presence of something like our own chlorophyll, some kind of light-harvesting pigment. All deduced from watching a single
point of light . . .’

Yuri had no idea what he was talking about. But he had spent a great deal of his time since being woken on Mars not knowing what the hell was going on around him, and it didn’t seem to
make any material difference.

He was aware that that caveman Klein was watching him. He started to think of how he was going to deal with that, as the astronaut’s voice droned on and on.

But Lemmy was still staring at him, as if he was working something out. ‘Nobody told you. My God.’

‘Told me what?’

Gustave Klein seemed to have an instinct for trouble. He leaned forward. ‘What’s this?’

Lemmy ignored him. ‘You said something about being sent home. I just figured it out.
You think this is home
, don’t you? You think this is—’

‘Earth?’ Liu Tao asked now, wondering, staring at Yuri.

Klein stood up. ‘He thinks
what
? What kind of asshole—’

The class was breaking up, the ‘students’ turning in their seats to see what the commotion was. Major McGregor shut up at last, frowning in annoyance before his spectrograms.

Mardina Jones hurried up again from the back, tapping an epaulette on her shoulder. ‘Peacekeeper to Level 3, lecture room . . . What’s going on here? Is this something to do with
you, Eden?’

Yuri stood, hands spread, but he didn’t reply. He’d long since learned that replying was usually pointless, it made no difference to the treatment he got. But he felt surrounded, by
the astronauts, the students grinning to see someone else in trouble. Even Lemmy was staring at him.

And Gustave Klein was like a malevolent puppet master. ‘He doesn’t know! You’re right, you little runt,’ he said to Lemmy. His accent was thick Hispanic, despite his
Germanic-sounding name. ‘He doesn’t have a fucking clue. What a laugh.’

Now Peacekeeper Tollemache came bustling in, fully uniformed, flanked by two junior officers. They all had nightsticks at the ready – no guns, though, Yuri noticed in those first
moments.

‘You,’ Tollemache said. ‘Ice boy. I should have known. Out of the med bay for five minutes and trouble already.’ He flexed his nightstick.

Yuri tensed, preparing to rush him.

Mardina Jones stood between them. ‘Stop this! That’s an order, Peacekeeper.’

‘You don’t outrank me.’

‘Oh, yes I do,’ she said coldly. ‘You know the policy. Take it up with the captain if you like. I wanted you down here to keep order, not break more heads. And you –
whatever else you are, Yuri Eden, you’re good at making enemies.’