Proxima (25 page)

Trant said, ‘This is our engine room. We run everything through this one display. Under acceleration, this is a floor under our feet, but in microgravity it makes more sense to treat it as
a vertical wall – you can see there are hand- and footholds . . .’

Sir Michael King was watching Stef intently. ‘This is as close as we can get to the real action. I mean, I understand the display we see here is just a representation of the reality, but .
. . Can you feel them, Major? I know you’ve been around kernels for years, but not an array like this. Can you
sense
them? Can you feel their energies?’

And Stef thought she could, yes, a kind of tide that pulled at her body as she hung there in the air – a tide from the space-time knots of the kernels themselves, perhaps, or maybe a force
exerted by the powerful magnetic fields that held them in place, a great wall of them contained not metres from her position. She felt thrilled, viscerally, physically; the pathetic handful of
kernels in the lunar labs would have been lost in this huge assembly.

King said, ‘Here you are, confronted by the mystery. Tell me about kernels, Major Kalinski.’

‘I can tell you what we think we know. Which is precious little.’

He pulled a face. ‘And I could tell you how much that inadequate reply has cost me so far.’

‘Sorry.’

He said, ‘I know a kernel is a twisted bit of reality. Like a black hole, right?’

‘That was our first guess. Black holes are similarly twisted bits of space-time, yes, the remnants of imploded giant stars, or maybe relics of the Big Bang. And all black holes radiate;
they leak energy from their event horizons, and the smaller they get the hotter they are. But nothing fit. A kernel masses only
kilograms
, a lot less than any but the most evanescent black
hole. And the energy it emits isn’t black-hole Hawking radiation but something much more exotic, a flood of high-energy photons and very high-speed particles, like cosmic rays. Also, the way
the energy leaks from a kernel depends on the way you prod it.’

‘You mean with laser beams,’ King said. ‘Well, I know about that. A lot of lives were lost to establish that simple fact. And Mercury gained itself a new crater.’

‘By manipulating it with laser beams you can
shape
the way a kernel releases its energy store. Get it right and it can even be unidirectional.’

‘Like a little rocket.’

‘A microscopic photon rocket, yes. And that’s what makes them so useful. The kernels carry an electric charge, and are so light that a powerful enough magnetic field can hold a whole
bank of them in place, just as in this ship, behind this bulkhead. Fire the control lasers just right and they all open up, and you get a kind of photon rocket.’

‘Driven by a light as bright as the sun,’ King said. ‘Visible across interplanetary distances. Hell of a thing. After all these years, you know, I still can’t get used to
the sight. But what I want to know from you, Major, is how the damn things work. Where does all that lovely energy come from?’

‘Well, not from the structure of the kernel itself – it’s not massive enough for that. Our best guess is that a kernel is less like a black hole than a
wormhole—’

‘A tunnel in space.’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought wormholes were impossible,’ Trant said. ‘You need some strange kind of matter to keep them open.’

Stef always got irritated when some lay person asked her a question and then started lecturing her about the answer, rather than just
listening
. She snapped, ‘It may have looked
that way according to the kiddie Einstein-relativity stuff you learned at high school, Monica, before you gave up science for engineering. Have you ever heard of a dilaton field? No?’

Monica Trant looked irritated.

King raised luxuriant eyebrows, amused. ‘Well, that’s put
you
in your place. Let’s get to the basics. A wormhole is a tunnel, right? From here to . . . someplace
else.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So the energy that flows out of a kernel, the energy we harness to drive our hulks, doesn’t come from the kernel itself. It comes from someplace else, and is just transmitted
through the kernel.’

‘That seems to be true. The ultimate power source must be some very energetic event,
somewhere else
. A gamma-ray burster, maybe. Could be from the future or the past.’

Trant frowned. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘The wormhole could connect you to any other point in space and time, sir. Or—’

King waved a hand. ‘Enough, enough. You know, Major, some people are suspicious of the kernels. I mean, their very existence. Your own father was, right? There we were struggling to come
up with ways to reach the stars. And now we’ve been handed this magic power source, on a plate, and we’re off to Proxima Centauri. We needed a miracle, and suddenly we had one. The
problem is, you see, Major, in business or in politics, hell, in most marriages, if I give you something, it’s generally because I want something of you in return. So what’s the
catch?’

‘You’re assuming agency,’ Stef protested. ‘Intervention by some kind of consciousness. It’s better to rule that out until there’s overwhelming evidence.
Occam’s razor: you should default to the simplest explanation, and natural causes are the simplest explanation we have for most phenomena. Including the presence of kernels on
Mercury.’

Trant said, ‘Wait until we get you to Mercury, Kalinski.’ She shook her head. ‘Occam’s razor. Jesus.’

A gong sounded, echoing around the ship.

King turned to the ladder up to the main hull. ‘They’re about to fire up again. You’ll find me in my couch, until my old bones get used to gravity again . . .’

Stef was allowed to stay down on the control deck, with Trant, the two of them strapped into acceleration harnesses, watching as the highly trained crew went through the
process of firing up their laser banks, opening up their tame space-time knots, and allowing their unknown-source energy to stream out.

And the tremendous mass of the hulk was once more hurled forward into the heart of the solar system.

A
t Mercury the
Shrapnel
entered a low equatorial orbit, and a small, low-powered shuttle flew up to bring Stef, King, Trant and a couple
of ISF guards down to the surface. The little ship was piloted by ISF officers, who saluted Stef when she boarded while simultaneously security-scanning her. The shuttle had only one cabin, fronted
by the pilot with the passengers in the back, and while the passengers strapped in Stef heard the crew talk through more complicated security protocols. Evidently this wasn’t a place where
casual landings were welcome.

They came down in a sweeping powered descent across a shattered landscape. The shadows of crater-rim mountains, wave after frozen rocky wave of them, stretched across broken lava plains.

Trant turned to Stef. ‘Do you know where you are? On Mercury, I mean.’

Stef shrugged. ‘I only came back once to Mercury since the
Angelia
launch. It was a memorial service for my father after he died, given by the staff he worked with
here.’

‘I know. I was there, though we didn’t speak.’

‘I think this must be the Caloris basin.’ A tremendous impact crater that dominated one face of the planet. ‘Given the scale of the cratering features.’

‘Correct. The result of an impact that couldn’t have been much bigger, to have left any planet behind at all. I suppose you don’t need to know much about Mercury to guess that
much.’

‘I’ve had no briefing,’ Stef reminded her testily. ‘So it’s to be guessing games, is it, all the way down?’

‘We want you here to take a fresh look at what we found. I suggested it was best not to prejudice you in any way. Blame me, if you like.’

Stef felt a shiver of awe, flying over this tremendous ruined landscape, which itself concealed a much more exotic mystery. What the hell
were
they being so secretive about?

On the ground, in the chaotic shadows of Caloris, they were bundled into a rover. There was a driver and a couple of crew, all in ISF uniforms. The two security goons who had come down from
orbit with them followed too. Making her way to a seat in the rover, Stef experienced a gravity that was twice the moon’s, a third of Earth’s, a gravity that felt oddly familiar, a body
memory from her childhood.

The rover rolled off, and through the small windows Stef glimpsed the landscape of Mercury, for her a peculiar mix of alien and familiar. The sun was just below the horizon here, though a smear
of coronal light spread up into the sky. The shuttle landing site behind her was lit by brilliant floods.

‘Here.’ Trant opened a hatch and pulled out pressure suits. ‘One each. We’ll suit up en route in the rover.’

King awkwardly hauled his own suit over his bulk. ‘We’re making straight for the site.’

Stef asked, ‘What site?’

Trant said, ‘This is, or was, just another exploratory drilling site.’

‘You were looking for kernels.’

‘Essentially, though Mercury is also still exporting metals to the rest of the inner system. Stef, you’ll find dormitories in the well-head domes, showers, galleys. If you need a
break before we descend . . .’

Descend into what?
Every bit of information they gave her seemed to lead only to more questions. Let them play their games. ‘Let’s just get on with it.’ Trying not to
let their evident urgency transmit itself to her, she pulled on her suit, ISF standard issue, a piece of kit she was used to. The smart fabric slid into form-fitting shape around her; as the suit
recognised her a panel on the chest lit up with her mugshot, rank, commission number, name: KALINKSI, STEPHANIE P.

King smiled. ‘That’s correct, isn’t it? P for Penelope.’

Stef pulled a face. ‘A name I always hated even more than “Stephanie”. So you found kernels in Caloris, right?’

Trant looked out at the smashed landscape. ‘We’ve developed pretty efficient ways to prospect for kernels, even from orbit. We look for concentrations of the kernels’
distinctive energy signature, at sites easy to mine. The heart of Caloris has given us some rich pickings, actually. The kernel lodes here aren’t always quite as deep as elsewhere on the
planet, and the ancient impact shattered the bedrock, making it relatively easy to get through. “Relatively” being the word.’

Stef thought that over. ‘Which implies that the Caloris impact came later than whatever event laid down the kernels.’

King nodded approvingly. ‘That’s what my tame geologists deduce. Even though the Caloris event itself was very old, a relic of the planet-formation days. The kernels have been down
there a long time; whatever created them, or implanted them, was a very early event in terms of the history of Mercury – hell, of the solar system itself. So we drilled down into the floor of
the crater, and that itself was a challenge, I can tell you. But what we found – well, you’ll see for yourself.’

The rover had to pass through a couple more security cordons before pulling up at what was evidently a drilling site, dominated by a single massive rig standing on an area of relative flatness.
Stef saw hab domes covered in regolith for solar-radiation screening, a few more rigs much smaller in scale, and massive specialised vehicles.

As they unbuckled, Trant pointed out the equipment. ‘The rigs are structures of high-strength, high-temperature-tolerant carbon. Those smaller rigs were the first to make the discovery
we’re going to show you. We brought out the heavy-duty gear to allow human access to the find; that big momma over there drilled out the shaft you’re going to be riding down today . .
.’

A flexible transfer tunnel snaked out from a dome towards the rover. Trant led them through a brisk check of their pressure suits. ‘We’ll be riding a pressurised car down the
shaft,’ she said. ‘But we’ll wear the suits as a precaution anyhow. And of course the base chamber isn’t pressurised at all.’

Stef tried to figure out these pieces of the puzzle as she went through the routine of interrogating her suit’s functions.
Shaft? Base
chamber?

The rover hatch opened up, and they passed through the flexible tunnel to the dome. The interior was functional, with lab areas, bathrooms, suit lockers, a galley, bunks. A handful of staff
here, in shirts and shorts, working or eating handheld snacks, eyed the newcomers in their pressure suits curiously, but didn’t approach them. Stef felt she could have been inside any
pioneering-science-type establishment almost anywhere in the solar system, off Earth.

But this particular facility was dominated by a transparently walled elevator car, set at the very centre of the dome where the roof was highest, attached by winched cables to a stout metal
frame. And the car was suspended over an open shaft, from which fluorescent light leaked.

A shaft. A hole in the Mercury ground. Into which, evidently, Stef was going to have to descend. She felt a frisson of fear, and she was grateful for her ISF training, for the ability it gave
her to function despite her fear, even if she couldn’t hide it, probably.

Stef was led straight to the elevator, with Trant, King, and the two ISF goons who had ridden down from orbit with them and had barely spoken a word, even to each other. They all crowded into
the car. It contained a crate, Stef presumed containing supplies or emergency gear. A door, transparent as the walls, slid closed behind them.

Immediately the car began to descend, with a soft, low-gravity lurch. The dome and its inhabitants ascended out of Stef’s sight, and the walls of the shaft rose up to enclose the car.

The shaft walls were smooth, featureless, and it was impossible to judge directly the car’s speed of descent. But Stef could feel the acceleration.

Then, with a snap, as she could see through the transparent roof, the cables from the winch disengaged. Yet the car continued to descend.

‘This is a pretty fast ride.’