Proxima (49 page)

Yuri felt diminished, sitting here in this clean office, being ignored by a kid like Freddie. For all their accomplishments and wealth, they were just three shabby, ageing people, come in from
the country, facing the power of an interplanetary agency. He steeled himself, looking for inner strength.

But Liu was barely in control of himself. After thirty seconds he snapped: ‘You prick.’

Freddie looked up mildly. ‘Excuse me?’

‘You’re doing this deliberately. Stringing this out. Your mother would turn in her grave to see you like this.’

Yuri said, ‘Liu—’

Freddie said coldly, ‘My mother was a loser, like you, even before some disgruntled customer finally knifed her, and the best thing I ever did was to get away from you people, you
“Founders”. Now. You want to know about your daughter, or not?’

‘What do I need to do to get her out of here?’

‘Too late, I’m afraid.’ He grinned. ‘She’s gone.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’

‘Through the Hatch. Back to Mercury, back to Earth. Daughter of a Founder, you see, Liu. Too sensitive politically to handle here, on Per Ardua. That was the thinking. Don’t want any
trouble, do we?’

Liu looked like he’d been punched in the stomach. Yuri understood exactly what he was thinking.
Through the Hatch
: lost to him, for at least eight years, even if she turned back
immediately she reached the Mercury side.

‘Let me go.’ Liu stood up. ‘Take me. Shove me after her through your damn Hatch.’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ Freddie said. ‘Political sensitivities again.’

‘Sensitivities? What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Sit down.’

‘You prick—’

‘
Sit down
. I’m trying to do you a favour here, believe it or not.’

Stef grabbed Liu’s arm and dragged him down.

‘They’re coming for you too, Liu. I’ve put them off, actually. And the logic is you
should
be detained here, on Per Ardua. After all, you’re supposed to be
serving a sentence on this prison of a world, aren’t you? You were an enemy combatant, on Mars.’

‘My mission was surveillance—’

‘Ancient history. Wouldn’t be right to send you home, would it, without you serving your time? That’s the thinking.’

Yuri could see the muscles in Liu’s arms clench. Yuri said, ‘Liu. Listen to what he’s saying. What are you offering us, Freddie?’

‘Time for you to get him out of here. I fixed the security, you’ll be able to get away from the Hub, you won’t be stopped.’ He glanced around, faintly nervous. ‘You
understand I had to bring you all the way in here to tell you this. It’s the only place I could be sure we wouldn’t be overheard. Ha! Right in the heart of the complex. Take him as far
from here as you can.’

Stef asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘For my mother, believe it or not. She
was
a loser. But I know she thought well of you, Liu Tao. You’re an honorary uncle,’ he said with disgust. ‘This is what
you get. One favour. Now get him out, Yuri, before I change my mind.’

They had to drag Liu away.

The rover rolled past the quarantine camps, following the road’s steadily downward incline, heading out from the Hub.

Liu was too angry, too distressed to speak.

Yuri gave him some privacy by sitting up front with Stef. ‘So,’ he said. ‘We need to hide an angry Chinese from the Peacekeepers. Any ideas?’

‘Yes,’ she said, unhesitating.

He laughed. ‘I should have known.’

‘We get out of here with him ourselves. We go on an expedition. To another unique location, on Per Ardua, this world of mysteries and puzzles.’

He was baffled. ‘Where the hell?’

She glanced up at Proxima, directly above, its flare-scarred face shielded by scattered cloud. ‘As far from this place, this government-controlled substellar point, as it’s possible
to get.’

O
nce again Penny Kalinski was flown into the small Parisian airport at Bagneux.

Penny climbed stiffly down from the small plane. Out on the tarmac in the middle of the day it was ferociously hot, even this early in the year. She glanced up at a sky washed out with sunlight.
The Splinter was not visible just now, even though, like most of humanity, she knew exactly where to look for it, and knew exactly when it was due to arrive. That big damn rock was on its way. The
best predictions were that it would miss the Earth, just, at the conclusion of a countdown that had begun eleven years ago when she’d been at that chaotic resources conference on Ceres, a
count that had dwindled down to months, weeks, days – and now, at last, hours. But predictions were just that: predictions, best guesses. Nobody
knew
what was going to fall out of
the sky. And now it was almost here.

Penny had begun to think of the time left in terms of sleeps. Not that, in her late sixties, she slept all that well anyhow. Now, she suspected, she would not sleep again, not before the count
ran down.

A large automated car drew up to meet her. Sir Michael King was in the back, with a couple of UEI security goons, one male, one female – and, she was startled to see, Jiang Youwei, her
one-time guide on Chinese Mars and Ceres.

King and Jiang climbed out, King awkwardly and with the aid of a stick. King shook Penny’s hand. ‘Thanks for coming.’ His expression was grim, relieved only by the most
fleeting of smiles.

Jiang, however, tentatively embraced her. He looked so much older too, more gaunt, older than his forty years – but in his case that might be more to do with the harsh pressure of a full
Earth gravity on a frame conditioned to the comparative gentleness of Mars. When he moved, in fact, she heard a subtle whir of exoskeletal support about his body.

‘It’s good to see you, old friend,’ she said to him now. ‘But kind of surprising.’ She pointed at the sky. ‘Given the huge geopolitical boot that is about to
stamp on Earth.’

Jiang shrugged. ‘I am here for you, Penelope Kalinski.’

King raised his eyebrows. ‘Actually we’re all here because of Earth-shine, as usual. Look, shall we get back in the damn car? This heat is killing me.’

They all clambered into the car, a bubble of glass and ceramic. The security goons took their places front and back, with King, Penny and Jiang in the middle. The car slid away silent as a soap
bubble, heading north out of the airport. When Penny glanced back she saw the airport was empty of activity, not a plane in the sky, only a few craft sitting around on the apron and the terminal
buildings lifeless.

King seemed to have visibly aged since she’d last seen him. Despite, presumably, his ongoing courses of anti-senescence treatments. He was ninety-eight years old now. His Aussie accent
seemed more pronounced as well – his tone was cruder, as if he could no longer be bothered to mask his true feelings behind conventional civility.

But no doubt she had aged badly too. It was the stress, she supposed. The pressure. The
disappointment
. If you were anywhere near the centre of human affairs, even to the extent that
she was, your predominant emotion had to be disappointment at the way in which in an age when opportunities for humanity had never been greater, old flaws – territorialism, combativeness, a
reluctance to transcend cultural barriers, a sheer inability simply to see things from the other guy’s point of view – looked set to bring the sky crashing down on all their heads.

King saw her looking out of the window. ‘Quiet, isn’t it? Everybody who can get out of the city, got. Doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the Splinter does fall, despite everything
the Chinese have said, then it won’t matter where the hell you are. But still, people have fled to the country, if they can.’

‘While here we are, rushing to the centre. Where are we headed, the Champs-Élysées again?’

‘Not that. Earthshine’s found himself a better hidey-hole. You’ll see.’

‘I look forward to it,’ Jiang Youwei murmured. ‘I was born on Mars, as you know. I have seen too little of Earth, of the ancestral home of the human race.’

King grunted. ‘Make the most of it. Last chance to see, eh?’

‘It won’t come to that,’ Penny said.

The Splinter – actually an immense chunk of the metallic core of some long-destroyed dwarf planet, a shattered sister of Ceres – was on a grazing trajectory; if left undisturbed it
ought to skim the top of Earth’s atmosphere, and pass on more or less harmlessly. The UN’s tame astronomers and the defence agencies had determined this months ago, and the rock
hadn’t significantly deviated since then. But the surface of the rock was covered with Chinese technology, from solar-cell arrays to emplacements of what looked suspiciously like their big
Mars-terraforming bunker-buster bombs. Some observers even claimed they saw evidence of human activity, teams of taikonauts climbing around on the skin of the weaponised asteroid, even as it sailed
in towards the Earth. Nobody in the West
knew
what the Chinese were up to.

In ignorance, at least, Penny thought, there was still room for optimism, and she tried to express that.

But King didn’t seem to think so. ‘Twenty-four hours out after years of a Cold War stand-off, with that damn thing barrelling in towards the planet – and given it’s won
the Chinese damn few of the concessions they demanded – and you’re still hoping for the best, huh?’

‘What choice is there?’

‘To bury yourself in the deepest hole you can find –
that’s
the alternative. Which is exactly what Earthshine seems to be doing. And which is why we’re all here,
invited to the show. He sees me as the most senior figure in UEI, which is kind of true, though many on my board and the major stockholders might not agree after all these years. A lot of water
under the bridge. And he sees
you
as the queen of kernel science, which is what has caused us all this trouble in the first place. He’s trying to intervene in human affairs, the best
way he can. And the only way he can do that is by working through humans. Specifically us.’

Penny thought that over. ‘Could be he just thinks of us as friends, Sir Michael. He has known us a long time.’

‘And myself?’ Jiang asked softly.

‘He gets to as many Chinese as he can,’ King said bluntly. ‘In your case, through your relationship with Penny here. Your government and your security agencies are a lot more
sceptical of the Core AIs than we are, in the UN countries. The Chinese see them as yet another relic of the capitalist, colonialist era that started with the Opium Wars and finished with the
stunts of the Heroic Generation. Your people have long memories. So Chinese are harder to contact for the AIs.’

Jiang shrugged. ‘I am hardly influential. And our peoples are not yet at war. I was, however, warned, by a French consul on Obelisk in fact, about the personal risk I was undertaking by
coming here during the event. If there
were
to be some disastrous consequence—’

‘I wouldn’t worry,’ King said frankly. ‘If the worst comes to the worst there probably won’t be a lamp post left standing for you to be strung up from.’ He
laughed, and turned away to look out of the window once more.

Penny saw that they were heading through central Paris now, travelling roughly north-east along a broad avenue. There was very little traffic, a few pedestrians, some in silvery capes, hats and
goggles to fend off the ferocious sunlight. Through gaps between the clustered buildings she glimpsed the obvious landmarks, the Notre Dame cathedral up ahead, and the rusted ruin of the Eiffel
Tower further in the distance off to the left, a gaunt iron frame rendered blue-grey by the dusty air. Save for the lack of traffic and the basic desertion by its inhabitants, she imagined Paris
hadn’t changed much in the last century, or even the century before that; ancient ordinances against development had always preserved a certain look about the city. Paris was just Paris,
unique.

Jiang saw her looking. He smiled. ‘All this beauty will still be here this time tomorrow, I’m sure of it.’

‘Nobody can be sure of any damn thing,’ King muttered. ‘Not even the Chinese, whatever they’re planning. They’re playing with huge energies, the energies of an
interplanetary culture, and bringing them down to the Earth. Kind of irresponsible, even if it’s just to frighten us. I mean, one slip . . .’

Gunshot. A sharp crack. Everybody in the car ducked, even the security goons.

Everybody but King, who laughed. ‘Don’t sweat it. Just sound effects.’

Penny raised her head cautiously. They were rolling across a bridge to the Île de la Cité; she saw the hulk of the cathedral off to her right, and that big old banyan tree dangling
in the Seine that she remembered from her last visit. And she glimpsed people running over the bridge, in peculiar silvery suits speckled with pink dots. They looked to be carrying guns, or heavier
weapons, bazookas. They ducked between patches of cover, fired their guns, ducked back, and again she heard the crack of weapons firing, presumably simulated.

The car glided on smoothly through all this. The security guys looked embarrassed to have reacted.

‘Sound effects,’ King said again. ‘Background really, to fill out what the individual players are being fed.’

‘Players?’

King pointed at the combatants in the silver suits. ‘
Asgard
. The latest craze. A game, or a series of games, set in the historic centres of the old cities. Those characters
don’t see what you and I see.
They
are living in a virtual reconstruction of a Paris in 1945, when allied troops are moving in to lift the Nazi occupation of the city. The rules are
strict, kind of. You’re allowed to get killed, once a day. The next morning you come back and you can run around and start fighting all over again.’

Jiang was frowning. ‘My history is uncertain. Did the allies have to fight for Paris?’

‘No, not street to street. There was an agreement to protect the city; the Germans withdrew. It’s a game, a quasi-historical fantasy. There are similar games going on all over the
world. There’s a major campaign going on in Londres to defend the city against a Nazi invasion, and that didn’t happen either. The most popular, I’m told, is the Battle of
Stalingrad, that’s been running continuously for – well, I forget. And in America, the Civil War—’