Proxima (3 page)

Tollemache glowered at Yuri, but backed off. ‘You’re the reason I’m in this toilet, you little prick.’

Yuri grinned. ‘Good to hear it, Peacekeeper.’

Tollemache held his gaze for one more second. In the background Gustave Klein leered, drinking up the conflict.

Mardina Jones turned on Lemmy. ‘You. What do you mean, he thinks this is home?’

‘Think about it. The Peacekeeper there knocked him out while he was still on Mars! He never saw a thing, the sweep, the loading, he didn’t get any of the briefings we got. Such as
they were. Also, he’s out of his time. You must know that. He hasn’t got the background to understand.’

Mardina frowned, and glanced down at her slate; maybe she hadn’t known that, Yuri thought.

‘We all supposed he’d know what was going on. I guess. That he’d be able to figure it. But—’

‘But maybe not.’ Major McGregor came up to the little group now, and studied Yuri with amused interest. ‘I heard about you. I knew we had one of you lot aboard, a corpsicle. A
survivor of the Heroic Generation, eh? And now, here you are, and so confused. How funny.’ Apparently on impulse he said, ‘Follow me, Mr Eden. Bring your little bedwarmer if you like.
You’d better come too, Lieutenant. And you, Peacekeeper, if you can control yourself. Just in case it all kicks off.’

Mardina asked, ‘Where are you taking him?’

McGregor grinned and pointed upwards. ‘Where do you think? It will be a fascinating experiment. Come along.’

M
cGregor led a procession out of the lecture space to the spiral stair that wound its way up the wall of the tower. McGregor glanced over his
shoulder at Yuri, who followed directly behind him. ‘We have two of these habitat modules, strapped together side by side, for redundancy, you see . . . You’ll have to tell me what you
think of the design. For size, it was modelled on the first stage of the old Saturn V moon booster, for nostalgic reasons, I suppose. Of course much of what we are doing is of symbolic as well as
practical value.’

At the top of the tower was a domed roof. They climbed up through that into what was evidently some kind of control room, with a central command chair, vacant just now, arrays of bright screens,
and another dome, midnight dark, over their heads. Operatives in astronaut uniforms sat at terminals around the periphery. One or two looked back at McGregor and his party, frowning, disapproving
of an incursion into this sanctum of control.

McGregor was studying Yuri, amused. ‘Where do you think you are now?’

Yuri shrugged carelessly, though a kind of deep anxiety was gnawing in his stomach.

Mardina murmured, ‘Lex, go easy—’

‘No, really. Tell me. Come on, man, speak up.’

‘Top of the tower.’

McGregor thought that over. ‘Well, yes. That’s correct, sort of. Perceptually speaking anyhow, given the vector of the thrust-induced gravity. But there’s rather more to it
than that.’ He clapped his hands. ‘Lights off.’ The wall lamps died, fading quickly. ‘Just look up. Give your eyes a minute to adjust.’

Yuri obeyed. Slowly, the stars came out across the dome, a brilliant field, like night in the Martian desert. There was a particularly prominent cluster directly overhead.

‘What do you see?’

‘Stars. So what? So it’s a clear night.’

‘A “clear night”. Where do you think you are?’

Yuri shrugged. ‘Somewhere with a good sky. Arizona.’ He vaguely remembered a high-altitude site with big astronomical telescopes. ‘Chile?’

‘Chile. You understand that what you see is simulated, a live feed from cameras mounted on the ISM shield.’

‘ISM?’

‘Interstellar medium.’ McGregor clapped his hands again. ‘Wraparound VR star field.’

The walls and floor of this deck shimmered and melted away. It was as if Yuri, with McGregor, Lemmy, Mardina Jones, Tollemache, Liu Tao, and the handful of operators with their screens, were
standing on a floor of glass. And all around him, above and below, he saw stars, with one particularly brilliant specimen directly under his feet.

McGregor grinned by the light of the stars and the display screens. ‘Now what do you see? Where is the Earth? Where’s the planet you thought you were standing on?
Where’s
the Earth
, Yuri Eden?’

Yuri felt his head swim, the universe close up around him, as if he was fainting from fluid imbalance again.

McGregor pointed downwards. ‘
There
. Down in that puddle of light. That’s the sun. We’ve been travelling from Mars’ orbit for a month. We are now—’ he
glanced at a screen ‘—two hundred and thirty astronomical units from the sun. That’s two hundred and thirty times as far as Earth is from the sun – about eight times as far
out as Neptune – about a light-day, if I’m not mistaken. You are a long, long way from Earth, my friend.’

‘A ship.’ It didn’t sound like his own voice. ‘This is some kind of ship.’

‘Not just any old ship. This is the
Ad Astra
. And we are going—’ he pointed straight up, at the cluster of stars at the zenith ‘—there.’

‘You’re on a starship,’ Mardina Jones said, levelly, steadily, looking Yuri in the eye. ‘Heading to Proxima Centauri.’

‘Proxima Centauri,’ Yuri said dully. The very name was meaningless to him.

‘Yuri Eden, this is the UN International Space Fleet vessel
Ad Astra
. Two hundred colonists, in two hulls like this one. We’re driven at a constant acceleration, at one
gravity, by a kernel engine. This ship is like the hulk that brought you to Mars. But of course you don’t remember that. It’s a bit more than four light years to Proxima. Given time
dilation it will take us three years, seven months subjective to get there, of which we’ve already served a month . . .’

McGregor peered at him, searching for a reaction. ‘What are you thinking, man from the past?’

Peacekeeper Tollemache was more direct. ‘Ha! He’s thinking, what a prick I am. You thought you were on Earth, didn’t you? Why, you fucking—’

Yuri couldn’t punch a star, but he could punch Tollemache. He got in one good blow before Mardina Jones, this time, knocked him out.

It was going to be a long three years, seven months.

2155

W
hen Yuri Eden discovered he was on a starship, it was only a little more than a decade after the maiden flight from planet Mercury of a ship
called the
International-One
, the first demonstrator of the new kernel-drive technology that propelled the
Ad Astra
. Lex McGregor, then seventeen years old and an International
Space Fleet cadet, had taken part in that flight.

And it was thanks to McGregor that Stephanie Penelope Kalinski, then eleven years old, had first got to
meet
her father’s starship, created from another technology entirely.

It seemed strange to Stef, as she and her father took the long, slow, unpowered orbit from Earth in towards the sun aboard a UN-UEI liner, that there were to be not one but
two
new kinds of ships, the
International-One
and the
Angelia
, launched from such an unpromising place as Mercury at the same time.

Her father just rolled his eyes. ‘Just my luck. Or humanity’s luck. If I was a conspiracy theorist I would suspect that those damn kernels have been planted under Mercury’s
crust
in order that
we would find them now, just when we are recovering from the follies of the Heroic Generation, and reaching out, with our own efforts, to the stars . . .’

Stef wasn’t too clear what a ‘kernel’ was. But she was interested in it
all
, the different kinds of ships, the experimental engineering she’d glimpsed at her
father’s laboratories back home on the outskirts of Seattle, the rumours of these energy-rich kernels being brought up from deep mines on Mercury . . . She understood that the
International-One
was just some kind of interplanetary-capable technology demonstrator, while her own father’s ship, though uncrewed, was going to the stars, the first true
interstellar jaunt since the extraordinary journey of Dexter Cole, decades before. But she’d heard hints that these kernels they’d found on Mercury, and which were going to power the
I-One
, were actually much more exotic than anything her father was working on.

This was the kind of thing that always snagged her attention. She was doing well with her schooling, scoring high in mathematics, sciences and deductive abilities, as well as in physical prowess
and leadership skills. Her father had been paradoxically pleased when she had been flagged up with a warning about having introvert tendencies. ‘All great scientists are introverts,’
he’d said. ‘All great engineers too, come to that. The sign of a strong, independent mind.’ But Stef was always less interested in herself than in all the stuff going on outside
her own head. The
I-One
’s interplanetary mission was a lot less ambitious than the
Angelia
’s, but it was the
I-One
that had the hot technology. She was more
than interested in it. She was fascinated.

She didn’t much enjoy the cruise from Earth, though. She had followed the mission profile as their ship descended ever deeper into the heart of the solar system, ever closer to the central
fire, and Stef had come to feel oddly claustrophobic. Apparently the UN-led countries and China, who had carved Earth up between them, had shared out the solar system too, but China dominated
everything from Earth orbit outward, from Mars and the asteroids to Jupiter’s moons. Looking out from the cramped centre of the system, China seemed to Stef to have the better half of it,
with those roomy outer reaches, families of cold worlds hanging like lanterns in the dark.

On Mercury they landed at a big engineering complex in a crater called Yeats. This was not far from the equator, so that during the planet’s day the big looming sun was
high in the sky, pouring down the light and energy that fed the square kilometres of solar-cell arrays that carpeted much of the crater’s floor.

The gravity was lower than home, about a third, and in the high domes, built big so they could house the industrial complexes expected to sprout here in the future, you could go running and
leaping and break all kinds of long-jump records.
That
was interesting, and fun.

But for Stef the charms of Mercury quickly palled. It was hot enough to melt lead outside, at local noon anyhow. They had come here in the morning on this part of Mercury, and since the
‘day’ here lasted a hundred and seventy-six Earth days (a number that was a peculiar product of the planet’s slow rotation on its axis and its short year, that had taken Stef a
while to figure out), the big sun just hung there, low in the sky, dome-day after dome-day, and the long shadows barely moved across the crater’s flat, lava-choked floor. There was, in the
end, nothing on Mercury but rock, and there was only so much interest she could feign in solar-cell farms, or even the monumental pipeline systems they had built to bring water from the caches of
ice in the permanent shadows at the planet’s poles.

And she had to spend a lot of time alone.

Her father was immersed in final tests and simulations for his starship, and Stef knew from long experience when to get out of his way. He’d been just the same when her mother was alive.
The trouble was, unlike home, there was nobody else here much less than three times Stef’s age. Mercury was like a huge mine, drifting in the generous energy-giving light of the sun, and not
a place to raise kids, it seemed; it was a place you came to work for a few years, made your money, and went back home to spend it. For all that the virtual facilities were just as good as back in
Seattle, it got kind of boring, and lonely, quickly.

Things got a bit better as more people started to show up, shuttling in from Earth and moon for the launches.

There were actually two crowds arriving here, Stef quickly realised, for the two separate projects, the
Angelia
and the
International-One
. Her father’s project, the
Angelia
, was basically scientific: a one-shot uncrewed mission to Proxima Centauri intended to deliver a probe to study the habitable world the astronomers had found fifty years earlier
orbiting that remote star. Since that discovery, of course, a human had actually been sent to Proxima, a man called Dexter Cole, who, launched decades before Stef had even been born, had yet to
complete his one-way mission; the
Angelia
, representing a new technology generation, would almost overtake him. The throng gathering to watch the
Angelia
launch were mostly
scientists and experimental engineers, along with the bureaucrats from state and UN level who were backing the project. They were men and women in drab suits who spent more time staring into each
other’s faces over glasses of champagne than looking out of the window at Mercury, a whole alien world, it seemed to Stef.

The
International-One
, meanwhile, was a project of a huge industrial combine called Universal Engineering, Inc. – UEI. Its chief executive was a squat, blustering, forty-year-old
Australian called Michael King, and he came out here with a much more exotic entourage of the rich and famous. ‘Trillionaire-adventurers’, her father called them dismissively.

There were even a few Chinese, ‘guests’ of the UN and the UEI, to ‘observe’ the great events taking place here on UN-dominated Mercury, although it seemed to Stef that it
was a funny kind of ‘observing’ where you weren’t allowed to have close-up views of anything important at all.

Stef did have to show up at drinks parties and other functions at her father’s side. Of the trillionaires’ club Michael King was the only one who displayed any kind of interest in
her personally, as opposed to treating her as some kind of appendage of her father. When she was introduced by her father, King, avuncular, a glass of champagne low-gravity sloshing in his hand,
leaned down and looked her in the face. ‘Good clear eyes. Unflinching gaze. Curiosity. I like that. You’ll go far. You keeping up at school, Stephanie?’