Proxima (50 page)

‘I get the picture.’ Penny glanced up at the sky, looking for the Splinter. ‘This is how people spend their time, while that big rock comes sailing in towards the Earth?
Isn’t it kind of decadent?’

King shrugged. ‘Everything might end tomorrow. What else is there to do? You can’t blame them for escaping.’

The car rolled on, heading north over another bridge, leaving the island behind. In the quasi-tropical sunlight of a post-Jolt Paris, more game players dashed across the road to hide in shadows,
fighting out a non-existent war three centuries out of its time.

T
he car pulled into a lot under the sprawling roof of the Gare du Nord, once one of the city’s main railway stations. Penny discovered that
after various transport revolutions, the station had long been retired, turned into a museum, and ultimately converted into a somewhat ramshackle shopping area and living space, with lanes of
apartments set out along what had once been platforms beside the rail tracks – and now even that had been abandoned. The station was a relic flattened under layers of history, even if that
elderly nineteenth-century roof was still impressive.

Today the old station seemed to be empty, Penny observed, as the security guys hurried them through from the car, looking around suspiciously. Everybody was hunkered down, in Paris as elsewhere,
waiting for the show in the sky to come to its climax.

They were led to a newer installation, tucked in one corner of what appeared to have once been the main station concourse. This was just a cube of what looked like smart concrete, a few metres
to each side, inset with a massive steel door. There were no controls, no visible cameras, but when King stood before the door the steel plate slid down into the ground. Penny found herself looking
into an elevator car, a brightly lit metal box. King looked back at the others, beckoned, and led the way in.

There were no controls in the car, no markings on walls of metal broken only by a few strip lights, a handrail around the wall. When the door sealed up it was as if they had all been confined in
some high-tech coffin. A subtle lurch told Penny that the car was dropping. There was no sound save for their own breathing, the soft rustling of their clothes. Penny, feeling very elderly,
resisted grabbing the handrail.

‘If ever you suspected you had claustrophobia,’ King said with a slightly malicious smile, ‘this is where you find out.’

Penny shrugged. ‘In spacecraft and dome colonies, that stuff gets beaten out of you.’

‘Suit yourself.’ But King looked slightly nervous himself. When the descent slowed, he took a firm grip of the handrail. ‘You might want to grab on for the next part –
you particularly, Jiang, if you’re not steady on your feet in this gravity.’

They all followed his lead.

There was another lurch. Now Penny could sense that the car was no longer dropping, but accelerating steadily forward. Still there was no noise, nothing but the abstract sense of motion. She
said, ‘I feel like I’m in some Einstein thought experiment.’

Jiang forced a smile. ‘Yes. I recall from high school. A person in an elevator car cannot distinguish between acceleration due to motion and acceleration due to gravity.’

King growled, ‘Well, you’re in somebody’s thought experiment all right, but not Einstein’s. If only.’

Jiang was standing slightly awkwardly, and Penny heard the creak of his exoskeletal support. ‘I think perhaps on the return journey I will request a chair to sit on.’

‘Good for you,’ King snapped. ‘If there is a return journey.’

At last the car glided to a halt. The door slid down into a slot in the floor. Penny peered out, curious, at a chamber, a kind of tunnel, very wide, very tall, a curved roof panelled with
fluorescents. She had an increasing sense of unreality, of detachment.

And in the foreground there was Earthshine, in the guise in which she and Stef had first met him at Solstice, many years ago – or, according to Stef, her alone, in some lost timeline. He
was tall, slim, dapper in a black, uncluttered business suit, with that engraved granite brooch in his lapel. With artfully greying hair he looked about fifty. Ageless where the rest were ageing,
but in reality far older than any of them.

‘Welcome to my latest underground lair,’ he said. He smiled, but his expression was complicated – distracted, Penny would have said. But she reminded herself that everything
about the figure she saw was an artifice. He beckoned, and walked ahead. ‘Please – join me.’

They stepped out of the cage, following him. Penny saw now that this tunnel, a wide circular bore, stretched off into the distance, dead straight; the walls, panelled with some kind of ceramic,
curved over a smooth floor laid along the centre line of this big cylindrical volume, and heavy doors led off to side chambers. The central space was full of rows of white boxes, computers and
other equipment. Small servo-robots moved everywhere, and Penny glimpsed human operators. The air was surprisingly cold, though that was a welcome change after the heat of a Parisian spring day,
and there was a faint scent of ozone.

Earthshine hurried them along, though Jiang and King struggled to make progress. ‘I’m sorry not to give you the guided tour. There have been developments . . .’

‘This is a computer-processing facility,’ Jiang Youwei said, looking around. ‘And an expensive one, by the look of it.’

‘Quite right.’ Earthshine gestured. ‘The floor divides the tunnel in two. Below there is a bay for power, cabling, and life-support systems. And above, memory store and
processing capacity. This is an environment designed to survive alone without external support for an extended period. Just like a dome on your Chinese Mars, Jiang Youwei.’

‘This is
you
,’ Penny said. ‘This computer facility. You are stored here. We’re walking through your head!’

Earthshine laughed – a distracted laugh, but a laugh. ‘It is difficult to be definitive; it is difficult to say what is “me”. Thanks to neutrino links my separated stores
around the world are connected by lightspeed comms, but even so there are perceptible delays, a fraction of a second. As if parts of my head are slower to respond. But, yes, I intend this to be my
primary node for the moment.’

‘Because you think you’ll be safe here,’ King said. ‘Under the English Channel?’

And suddenly Penny realised where she was.

‘That’s the idea,’ Earthshine said. ‘This is the old Angleterre-France tunnel, or one of them; you reached it via an upgrade of a relatively recently built subway.
We’re not, in fact, under the Channel; we’re not as far out as that. The tunnels were abandoned as transport links when the first cross-Channel monorail bridges were opened. But they
are built of centuries-old concrete and are as tough as they come – in fact more than ever, after a dusting of nanotech. An ideal refuge. Besides, something in me likes the idea that I am
inhabiting a ruin, with a historic purpose of its own. My siblings, you know, prefer to dig out their own custom-designed bunkers. Perhaps this is all an expression of my own link back to humanity,
however tenuous it might seem to you, which is where I differ from my fellows.’

King grunted. ‘Taking no chances, are you?’

‘Would you?’

‘Well, I’m impressed,’ Penny said.

‘Thank you, Colonel Kalinski.’

They had been walking more and more quickly, driven by the sense of urgency that emanated from Earthshine. Jiang was getting breathless. Penny went to take his arm, but he shook his head.

Earthshine cut to the left, and they followed him into a side chamber. Though a mere offshoot of the main tunnel, this was a big space itself, with walls of brick, heavily painted a faded yellow
colour. There was a scattering of chairs, tables, slates, doors that led through partition walls to what looked like bedrooms. Maybe this had once been an equipment store, Penny thought, a control
room, or a fire-control position.

But today the room was dominated by tremendous screens, plastered over each wall and free-standing on the floor, screens filled with images beamed from space, trajectory graphs, talking heads on
conventional news channels. There were no staff here, no interpreters, no analysts. Just the screens, bringing a flood of data into this place.

The group spread out, the security guys pulling up chairs to sit against one wall. Jiang sat too, heavily, with a sigh of relief. A servo-robot, a squat cylinder like a dustbin, rolled towards
them bearing a tray of coffees, glasses of wine, water, orange juice. Earthshine reached down and took a coffee, evidently a virtual placed among the real versions, an impressive bit of realisation
in Penny’s eyes.

Earthshine said, ‘All this data flows through me, gathered from every source to which I and my siblings have access. Call it nostalgia. I feel that today, of all days, I want to experience
what is to come as human, through human eyes, at a human pace, as far as possible.’

Penny nodded. ‘But a human with a very large disposable budget for TV screens.’

‘There is that.’

King was still standing, leaning on his stick under one of the larger screens. ‘
Look
at that. Jesus.’

It was an image taken from some spaceborne telescope, Penny saw. She recognised the curve of the Earth, just a sliver of it, in the corner; the stars were washed out by the brightness. But there
was the Splinter, brilliantly sunlit, and sparkling – no, she saw as the imager zoomed in, the rock was breaking up.

‘Calving,’ Jiang Youwei said.

King turned on him. ‘All part of your master plan, is it?’

‘I am privy to no plan.’

‘I told you there had been developments,’ Earthshine said. ‘It only just started. And it’s certainly deliberate. Some of the ground-based ’scopes have been
observing explosions, detonations in the structure of the asteroid. A couple of fragments have been slung away, but the rest, as a swarm now, are still heading for Earth. You don’t get a
sense of scale from these images. The object, or the swarm, is still heading for Earth at interplanetary speeds. It is still far away, but—’

‘Closing all the time,’ King said.

‘Yes. The old estimates of close-encounter time are defunct, by the way. Given the scatter of the object – well, the encounter has already begun. There is news from other
theatres,’ Earthshine said now.

King turned on him. ‘Theatres? What kind of a word is that?’

‘Is it not appropriate? Is this not a war?’

‘Just tell us,’ Penny said.

Earthshine pointed to various displays. ‘At the asteroids, and over Mars, UN hulk ships have appeared.’

‘Appeared?’ King snapped, again showing his tension. ‘What do you mean, appeared?’

‘They seem to have been hidden until now by some kind of stealth technology.’

‘It’s hard to imagine how a kernel-physics drive in operation could be cloaked,’ Penny said. ‘They must have been in place for a while.’

‘This is the UN response to the Sliver,’ said King. ‘Or part of it. All part of the game. The targets are obvious, I guess, and symbolic: the Halls of Ceres, the Obelisk on
Mars.’

‘But this is all just sabre-rattling, right?’ Penny said. ‘Nobody’s fighting yet. Nobody’s dying.’

‘Not quite true,’ Jiang said, and he pointed to an image of a riot somewhere on Earth, a crowd running at a line of tanks.

Earthshine said, ‘The war in heaven is already starting to cast shadows on Earth. There are reports of clashes at Chinese borders with UN nations. In Siberia, for instance. And in
Australia, there is a rebellion going on in Melbourne against Chinese rule. The Splinter has not been wielded in their name, they protest.’

‘Too right,’ Sir Michael King said, his own Australian accent thickening. ‘Let’s kick those Red Chinese back into the sea . . .’

At least he had his home to think of, Penny reflected. She herself was rootless; she had no home worth recollecting. Only Stef.

And she wondered where her twin was, right now. It was an eerie thought that whatever happened today, it would take Stef four years to learn about it. She’d had only one message from Stef,
in fact, since she’d gone through the Hatch on Mercury, a simple confirmation that she and Yuri Eden had survived the passage. Penny had made screen-grabs from the message, scratchy, frozen
images of Stef’s face. The face of a woman who had just survived an experience she could barely describe, let alone understand. And there she was on a whole new world, a world awaiting her
discovery.

Did Penny envy her? Maybe. But mostly, like right now,
she wanted her sister back
. Not just physically, not just from across this thick barrier of spacetime that separated them. Back
the way it had been before the two of them (as she recalled it) had opened that damn Hatch on Mercury. And –

‘This is it,’ called King.

S
tef Kalinski had been able to acquire maps of the dark side of Per Ardua from the ISF authorities at the Hub base. She spread them out on the
floor of the garage Yuri had built to house the ColU, outside his villa on the outskirts of the UN enclave, so all four members of the expedition could see them: Stef herself, Yuri, Liu Tao and the
ColU. Yuri had never known such maps even existed; he’d always assumed the dark side was just a blank mystery.

These sketchy plans had been produced from the only full orbital survey that had ever been conducted of Per Ardua, or at least the first that had ever been reported back, by the
Ad
Astra
in her first few loops around the planet on arrival. There were lots of gaps, blank spaces: the dark side’s deep planetary shadow had been relieved only by the brilliant point
light cast by Alphas A and B, and the ship’s orbit had been so low that much of the surface had never been seen at all. What
had
been seen had never been surveyed properly, for
instance with radar-reflection or spectroscopic gear, and in the years since there had been no resources to send up satellites of any kind to finish the job.