Proxima (55 page)

The dead man bore a UN roundel on his sleeve. A sheen of ice lay over his features. He was smart, clean-shaven, even his hair combed. He looked like an astronaut.

Stef said, ‘I guess he wanted to die in his uniform, huh.’

Liu looked at her. ‘You know who this is?’

‘I know who it has to be.’

‘Dexter Cole?’ Yuri asked. The pioneer who had come to Proxima on some wild solo mission, half-baked even compared to the
Ad Astra
venture, in the decades Yuri had slept
away in cryo.

‘Yes. There is identification here.’

They all backed out of the tent.

Yuri said, ‘The colonists used to think Cole’s ghost was roaming around Per Ardua. Remember that, Liu?’

‘I guess we might have been right about that.’

‘So what happened to him?’

Liu pointed to a heap of paper he’d gathered together on the ice. ‘He left a journal. A video diary too. But there’s also a letter, one page.’ He held this up in his
gloved hand. ‘The bullet-point summary. Evidently he wanted to be sure we got the message. He did what he had to do. He says that, over and over. I guess he didn’t want to be remembered
a failure. Or worse.’

Stef said, ‘He did what he had to do? What does that mean? He evidently made it to the Prox system. He was the first human to cross interstellar space, the first to land on Per Ardua.
He’ll be remembered for that.’

‘Yes,’ said Liu. ‘But he was actually here to colonise, remember. It went wrong – according to the note. He crashed, somewhere on this dark side, the frozen side. He had
no comsat, he couldn’t even send a message home to say what had happened. Much of his equipment was wrecked. He seems to have improvised all this gear. A kind of ski-bike, to get around on
the ice. He hauled everything else after him.’

‘He came here, to the antistellar,’ Stef said. ‘Why?’

‘He wanted to be found, or his body anyhow. He knew he couldn’t make it to the near side. Where else are people going to come, on the dark side?
We
zoomed straight here. He
wanted people to know his story. And he didn’t want to be thought of as a monster.’

Yuri frowned. ‘Why the hell would anyone think that?’

Liu kicked the processing gadget. ‘This isn’t an iron cow, not a food machine. Dexter Cole was supposed to be the father of a whole colony. That was the idea. The strategy was that
he would bring human embryos, frozen in here, that he’d thaw out one by one, and feed up, and raise. Twenty little colonists in the light of Proxima, with Cole as the godfather. That was the
vision.’

‘Instead of which . . .’

‘Instead of which he was lost in the dark, and starving. He grew the embryos, all right. He must have found nutrients somewhere to feed the incubator – volcanic pools, I guess. But
what he did with them . . .’

‘Oh, God.’ Stef knelt on the groundsheet, by the machine. She picked up something from the floor – a heap of white fragments, like a tiny builders’ midden, Yuri thought.
Bones. Finger bones, perhaps. Stef put them respectfully back where she’d found them.

Yuri looked down at the dead man’s stern, placid features, and wondered how sane he had been, in the end, alone in the icy dark with his only food source, this grisly repast.

Liu shrugged. ‘What would you have done? What would any of us do? The kids couldn’t have survived here anyhow.’

The ColU said evenly, ‘That’s not all he did here, though. I have inspected the wider area. Dexter Cole did more than just survive. There’s something else here. In the ice, I
mean. Something he found.’

They looked at each other. Then they hurried over to the ColU, which was standing at the lip of the depression in the ice.

It wasn’t a natural formation, nothing like a crater. It was a pit. Cole had blown a pit in the ice. And at the bottom, it looked like he had got to work with a pick of some kind. He had
exposed a sheet of a grey metal-like substance, and a fine circular seam, a few metres across.

‘Dexter Cole evidently became curious,’ the ColU said. ‘About this place, the antistellar, a point of obvious significance. Perhaps he retained some equipment from his crashed
ship. He may have detected structures beneath the ice, with radar or sonar echoes. And he certainly had explosives.’

They all scrambled down into the shallow depression. The ColU rolled forward, playing its lights over them.

‘A Hatch,’ Yuri said. ‘He only found another fucking Hatch, ColU!’

‘Yes. And diametrically opposite the first, at the substellar Hub. Also there is a field of kernels, buried in the rock of this area.’

‘What is going on with these Hatches?’

Stef knelt and pointed, grinning. ‘Look. Hand-shaped lock grooves. We can open this.’

Liu stared. Then he held up Cole’s one-sheet missive, scanning it quickly. ‘Cole says this was featureless when he found it. He even made a sketch. Look. He took images on his slate,
he says. No hand marks.’

‘Then it changed,’ Yuri said. ‘Just as the day side Hatch changed when we first went into it.’

‘And the one on Mercury, the same,’ Stef said.

Yuri looked at her. ‘What are we going to do about it?’

She grinned. ‘What do you think?’

Liu backed away, hands raised. ‘Whoa. You’re talking about going into that thing? Count me out.’

The ColU said, ‘I think it is my duty to point out that you are entirely unprepared, Yuri Eden.’

‘That never stopped us before.’

‘True. But there may not even be breathable air on the other side. Consider Mercury—’

‘We’re going anyhow.’ He grinned at Stef, who grinned back. ‘We’re done with Per Ardua, aren’t we? Done with Earth. Especially if they import their war
here.’

The ColU stood still, its floods splashing light over the Hatch in its pit. ‘You are determined.’

‘That’s right.’

‘In that case I have a request.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Take me with you.’

Stef laughed briefly, but fell silent again.

For a moment nobody spoke.

Stef said, ‘It’s serious, isn’t it?’

Liu snorted. ‘This is a glorified tractor. A farming machine.’

‘Not just that,’ said the ColU. ‘I am a sentient, curious entity. I too wish to know what lies beyond this latest Hatch. And I have a store of knowledge, data . . . Imagine how
useful a companion I could be, Yuri Eden.’

Stef said, ‘But how the hell are you going to get through the Hatch anyhow? You’re not modular, like the modern designs, so you can’t be carried through in pieces, or even
climb through yourself. You wouldn’t fit.’

‘I would suggest you detach my central processing core. That would suffice. Interfaces can be arranged later. Even a slate would be enough for that.’

Stef looked at Yuri. ‘We’re going to do this, aren’t we?’

Yuri just grinned. ‘I owe you one for Mister Sticks, ColU. You’d better show us how to take you apart.’

They took a day to prepare, to don layers of clothing, to pack rucksacks, to select weapons.

And to detach the ColU’s processor core, under its own instructions, as if it were supervising its own lobotomy, and to load it gingerly into a pack which Yuri wore on his chest. It was
like cradling a baby, he thought, like the papooses he and Mardina had made to carry Beth when she was very small.

Then it was time to go. After a day, for both Stef and Yuri, the immediate impulse to
leave
that they’d both felt on finding the Hatch stayed strong.

Still Liu hung back. ‘Are you sure about this? I’ve never been through one of these damn things. You could end up anywhere, right?’

‘That’s the fun part,’ Stef said.

Yuri looked at Liu. ‘We’re sure. And you’re sure you want to stay?’

‘Yeah. I’ll take my chances with the UN. And besides, staying on this side of that Hatch is the only way I’ll keep open some remote chance of getting to Thursday October again.
But you two – Stef, if you do this you’ll never see your family again. Your twin.’

Stef just laughed. ‘Some loss.’

‘And you, Yuri. Maybe there’s a chance with Beth—’

‘I know Mardina. And I know with stone certainty that I’ll never see Beth again, come what may.’

Liu nodded. ‘So you may as well keep going, right?’

‘Through another door, yeah. And another. What else is there?’

‘I’ll tell them what became of you.’

Yuri grinned. ‘Well, maybe we’ll be back to tell it all ourselves.’

‘You really think so?’

‘No.’ He turned to Stef. ‘Are you ready?’

‘Always.’ She pulled off her mittens, exposing hands, stretched her fingers wide. ‘Let’s do this quickly. It’s so cold.’

‘True enough,’ said Yuri, pulling off his own mittens. ‘Are you ready? Together then. One, two, three—’

Opened up, the Hatch was just like the one between the Hub and Mercury, a pit under the hatch lid, another door on the wall with indentations for their hands, lit up by a sourceless pearly
light.

Yuri and Stef climbed down, using a rope held by Liu. Yuri moved carefully, protective of the ColU.

Opening the door in the wall was easy. They walked through into an intermediate chamber, just like in the Mercury Hatch, with doors on either side. It was so warm in here they immediately
started pulling open their winter-weather gear.

They looked at each other. The door back to Per Ardua was still open, but Liu was already out of sight, beyond the outer chamber, on the surface.

‘Do it,’ said Stef.

Yuri shut the door. Then they crossed together to the second door, and laid their hands in the cuttings in its surface.

As the door opened they both stumbled. The gravity had shifted again.

Committed, Yuri thought.

A
s the hot war loomed, it took three days for King to secure Earthshine’s ship.

The
Tatania
, an untested upgrade of the
Ad Astra
but one of the UN’s few hulk craft capable of interstellar travel, was diverted to the moon. There Earthshine, or at
least a downloaded copy, would be picked up and fired off into deep space as fast as the hulk was capable of driving him. Whether he intended to go as far as the stars was not yet clear.

‘Maybe he’ll just hang around in orbit around Pluto until the fuss dies down,’ Sir Michael King said cynically. King himself, having gathered his family around him, intended to
weather the storm in the bunker under the Channel. ‘I’ll soon be a hundred bloody years old,’ he’d said. ‘I’m done running.’

It was a reasonable deal to make, Penny thought. A partial version of Earthshine’s own persona was going to stay behind in the great stores he’d established there, so the refuge
would continue to function; why not let King and his family stay too?

For herself, Penny remained determined to flee with Earthshine. Sooner that than huddle in a hole in the ground, cowering from the fire of an interplanetary war. And
Earthshine was
determined to go
. That was what swung it for Penny, in the end. Penny wondered what he knew about this war that she didn’t – what he knew, or feared. Anyhow, staying at his side
struck her as a good survival strategy just now.

And she wanted Jiang to come with her. He was as much of a friend to her as anybody. He, however, wasn’t at all sure that it was wise to flee on an experimental ship at a time of
interplanetary war. Maybe staying buried in the ground was safer. But his own position was difficult, as a Chinese national in UN territory. Penny, with support from King, had already had to fend
off official calls for his internment. If he stayed here, he’d probably lose his liberty – assuming they survived at all. In the end the choice for him was logical enough.

So they prepared to leave. The last Penny saw of the Channel bunker was Sir Michael King’s crumpled, surprisingly tearful face as he said goodbye at the elevator shaft, with his youngest
daughter alongside him.

They flew to Kourou, landing in blasting heat despite the Splinter’s Mighty Winter, where they would catch a shuttle to orbit.

They had time to spare. For now this strange, covert, half-declared war seemed to be developing at its own chthonic pace, as the Chinese moved their spacegoing assets into position to make what
everybody assumed was going to be a wave of attacks on UN installations on the moon and near-Earth space, or at least to threaten such attacks. Chinese spacecraft were beautiful but slow; it was an
armada that moved only a little faster than the pace at which the planets shifted across the sky. Deeper in space, probably, UN ships were similarly closing in on their own targets. Penny imagined
a solar system full of huge energies eager to be unleashed – of command chains compromised by the long minutes of lightspeed delays in communications across interplanetary space.

But slow-paced or not war seemed to be on the way, and a new long countdown started in the head of everybody on Earth who followed the news.

And they needed the time. It seemed to take an age to arrange the uploading of Earthshine – or a decent partial that was, it seemed, ultimately destined to become the primary copy –
into a compact, high-density portable store, a unit small enough to fit into the Earth-to-orbit shuttle. Penny had wondered why Earthshine could not simply be loaded digitally into some store on
the hulk ship. Well, this unit was the answer to that; it was a technology she’d not encountered before, a technology no doubt protected by layers of corporate secrecy and government black
research – a technology of which Penny Kalinski, a physicist who had advised the top levels of the UN, knew precisely nothing.

At last the orbital shuttle, sitting on its tail at the Kourou field, was loaded up and ready to go. As she boarded Penny was aware of the significance, that this could be her last footstep on
Earth, but mostly she was just grateful to get out of the heat.

They lay on their backs in their rows of couches, Penny beside Jiang. Earthshine was here too, a virtual projection in a seat just ahead of Penny, in the cabin with them as a gesture of shared
humanity, he said. But his image flickered continually; his base persona in the tunnel under the English Channel was continuing to download material into the store aboard the shuttle, and would do
so, Penny understood, as long as the comms links survived.