Proxima (6 page)

He heard a scream. In the shadowy chaos, he saw that three men had got hold of a woman. Yuri knew them all; he’d thought one of the men at least was a friend of the woman, who’d
paired off with another guy. Yuri knew the woman too; called Abbey Brandenstein, she was an ex-cop and she could look after herself, but she was being overwhelmed. Now they were dragging her into a
corner, though she was still fighting back. As the screaming got worse Anna Vigil covered little Cole’s eyes and ears, and hugged him close.

The noise was still ferocious, a clamour of yells and screams. More alarm sirens were sounding off, adding to the racket. There was no sign yet of the Peacekeepers taking any kind of coordinated
action. Yuri saw Gustave Klein on the other side of the hull, flanked by a couple of his heavies, watching the action with a grin on his face. Maybe it was Klein who was really in control.

Lemmy peered cautiously up into the apex of the hull. ‘Delga’s reached the bridge, it looks like.’

‘What do you think they want?’

Lemmy shrugged. ‘To take the ship. Force the astronauts to whiz us all back to Earth. I bet there’s a similar breakout going on in the other hull; they’ll have timed it. I
guess it’s the last chance we’ll get. There’ll be no hope once we’re on the ground, on a planet of Proxima.’

‘But they could smash up the ship before they win that argument.’

‘True.’

‘You think it’s going to work?’

Lemmy grinned. ‘Nah. Look.’ He pointed to the far wall of the hull.

An airlock hatch opened and a dozen astronauts tumbled out of the lock and into the hull’s cluttered spaces. They wore hard, carapace-like pressure suits of brilliant white, marked with
arm stripes in gaudy recognition colours, red, blue, green. They had their helmets sealed, their faces hidden behind golden visors, and their movements were jerky, too rapid, over-definite –
a product of military-class enhancements, Yuri had learned, exoskeletons, drugs, boosters from the cellular level up. They carried weapons of some kind, not guns, not in a pressure hull, but what
might be tasers, even whips.

Some of the rebelling inmates went for them immediately. The astronauts fought back with clean, hard moves, and snaps of their tasers, rasps of the whips. They were like insects with their
superfast movements and hard outer shells, like space-monster cockroaches in this chaotic human environment. Before them the inmates looked grubby and unevolved. People fell back howling, blood
spraying into the air.

Meanwhile one group of astronauts, three, four of them, broke away and made for a big locked control panel a couple of decks higher up towards the bridge. More rebels tried to get in their way,
but the astronauts were too fast, too definite, and their opponents were brushed aside. The astronauts unlocked the panel with brisk taps of gloved fingers, and plugged pull-out leads into sockets
in their suits, perhaps for identity verification.

Then, not a minute after the airlock had first opened, a yellowish gas began to vent from outlets all around the hull, and people began coughing, panicking.

Lemmy grinned. ‘Sweet dreams. See you on Prox c . . .’

But Yuri was already falling away down a long dark tunnel, and could hear no more.

T
he ship’s population – what survived of it after the riots – was split up into small groups, held in isolated chambers in a
newly partitioned hull.

On being woken from his latest bout of unconsciousness, Yuri found himself cuffed with plastic strips to a metal-frame chair, itself locked to a mesh floor. He was in a small partition-walled
cabin with ten others, four women, six men. They were all dressed identically, in orange jumpsuits, with no boots, just socks. This was his assigned ‘drop group’, he was told. The only
one in here that Yuri knew well was Lemmy. He did soon learn that the passengers had already been assigned to these drop groups, nominally fourteen each, long before the insurrection, and now the
groups had been used as the basis for the lockdown.

They were supervised by Peacekeepers, never fewer than two at a time, with astronauts overseeing them, in the case of Yuri’s group Lex McGregor and Mardina Jones. As the days passed the
passengers were released one at a time in a cycle, to use a bathroom modified for zero gravity, to wash, to feed. When they were out of their cuffs Lex McGregor insisted they stretch and bend, to
keep from stiffening up. They were spoken to, but not encouraged to speak back, or to have conversations with each other.

The thrust was never restored, the gravity never came back on. But occasionally you would hear bangs and knocks, as if some huge fist was hammering on the hull, and jolts this way and that,
brief periods of acceleration. Lemmy murmured that having reached the Proxima system under its kernel drive, the ship must be using some secondary propulsion system to insert itself into a final
orbit, presumably around the target, the supposedly Earthlike third planet of Proxima. This was guesswork, however. They had no view out of the hull.

The crew processed them bureaucratically, forever ticking off names on the piss and feed rotas on their slates. There seemed to be no formal comeback after the insurrection. No hearings, no
disciplinary measures. Yuri guessed the crew didn’t care, they just wanted to dump their unruly passengers down on this Proxima planet and have done with them.

But it was evident there had been some punishment beatings. One man in Yuri’s group, called Joseph Mullane, some kind of dispossessed farmer type originally from Ireland, had been worked
over particularly hard, and Dr Poinar had to spend some time treating his wounds. But even he was kept cuffed to his chair.

Mullane had been one of the men Yuri had seen attacking Abbey Brandenstein, the ex-cop, at the height of the trouble – and Abbey herself was in this drop group too. Yuri had no idea if
their pairing up like this had been deliberate. Maybe not, if it was true that the groupings had been defined long before the insurrection. Abbey Brandenstein spent all her waking hours glaring at
Mullane.

In the hours and days that followed, Yuri never heard what had become of Anna Vigil and her kid; he didn’t ask, wasn’t told. Occasionally you heard voices from beyond the partition,
a murmur of movement, a snatch of a baby’s crying. Otherwise, as the shifts wore on, there was nothing to do but sit there, cuffed to your chair. It was possible to sleep; Yuri found that if
he relaxed, just let himself float in the zero gravity, he could find a position where the cuffs at his wrists and ankles didn’t chafe, and he could almost forget he was pinned down. He was
bothered by the fact of his lengthy unconsciousness, however. Another gap in his memory. It irritated him to have three years of counting disrupted like that.

A few days after the last of those attitude-engine thumps and bangs had died away, there was a heavier shudder, as if some huge mass had joined the hull.

Lemmy winked at Yuri. ‘Shuttle. Orbit to ground. This ship has two, one of the crew told me that—’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ said a Peacekeeper. It was Mattock, the cuts and bruises on his face yet to heal, his broken nose twisted – Mattock, who took out his suffering on Yuri in
sly kicks and punches, because Yuri had refused to help him before the fury of the mob.

Now Lex McGregor, with another Peacekeeper at his side, came swimming into the cabin. McGregor was in his sparkling astronaut uniform, as usual, and Yuri felt oddly ashamed at his own
shabbiness.

McGregor smiled.

‘Ladies and gentlemen. Time for us all to take a little ride. We’ll be boarding you one at a time. I do apologise, we’ll have to keep the cuffs on, you do understand how things
are following recent incidents. But I’m sure we’ll have no trouble. You first, Ms Amsler . . .’

Jenny Amsler, a small, timid woman who had once been a jeweller, looked terrified as she was bundled out.

The loading proceeded efficiently. When it was Yuri’s turn, the hefty Peacekeepers to either side of him propelled him through the weightlessness with a gloved hand under each armpit. His
last glimpse of the interior of the hull that had transported him across interstellar space was of blank-walled partitions, bits of equipment damaged by fire and vandalism. There was a smell of
smoke, vomit, blood, of shit and piss, and a tang that made his throat itch, maybe a remnant of the gassing.

He was taken to a shower room where he had to strip, was sprayed with some hot, disinfectant-smelling liquid, and made to clean his teeth with a plastic brush. Then he was dressed in a kind of
undersuit with a fresh jumpsuit on top. There was a diaper, he found, built into the undersuit, heavy pants around his crotch.

Then he was shoved out through a tight hatchway, and after a swivel of his vertical perspective found himself dropping into a craft laid out like a small, cramped airplane. There were couches in
rows of four, cushioned seats on which you could lie back as if in a dentist’s chair. Room enough for twenty passengers, he counted quickly. An open door to the front of the cabin led to the
cockpit, a cave of glowing lights where two astronauts worked, side by side, their backs to him.

The shuttle at least seemed clean. It had a new-carpet smell Yuri suddenly realised he hadn’t come across since he had been slotted into that cryo drawer back on Earth; nothing on Mars had
been
new
, or on the starship.

And through the cockpit window, over the shoulders of the crew, he glimpsed a slice of blue, like the sky of Earth.

All this in a glance before he was bundled down into a couch. Mattock and another Peacekeeper worked him over quickly, strapping him in with a heavy safety harness, but also cuffing him to the
frame at wrists and ankles with more plastic ties.

He was the fifth person to be loaded in, with not a word being spoken. Looking forward, he saw that among the other four already loaded, Abbey Brandenstein had been seated right next to Joseph
Mullane, one of her rapists.

Yuri looked up at the battered face of Mattock, who hovered over him as he laboured over the ties. ‘Hey, Peacekeeper. Bad idea,’ he ventured. ‘Mullane and Brandenstein
together—’

His reward was a knee in the stomach. Mattock had become proficient at bracing himself in the lack of gravity to make such blows effective. Yuri couldn’t help but grunt, but he tried to
show no other reaction.

‘Mind your own business, you little prick.’

The rest of the loading went ahead briskly, and almost in silence, save for muttered exchanges between the Peacekeepers. The passengers were all from the group in the confinement cell, eleven in
total. Lemmy was lodged just behind Yuri. Two comparative strangers were loaded into Yuri’s left and right, a big-framed Asiatic who Yuri knew only as Onizuka, who had once been some kind of
businessman, and a woman called Pearl Hanks, small, dark, old eyes in a young face, who had been a prostitute on Earth and on Mars, and, in the hull, had been again. Onizuka ignored Yuri, but he
looked past him at Pearl Hanks with a kind of calculation.

The hatch above their heads was slammed down with finality. And that, Yuri thought, was the last he was going to see of the
Ad Astra
.

With all aboard and tied down tightly, the two Peacekeepers settled in couches at the rear of the cabin. Lex McGregor came floating back from the forward cockpit, as usual immaculate in his
uniform. Beyond him, in the pilots’ cabin, Yuri glimpsed Mardina Jones pulling on a pressure suit.

McGregor faced the passengers. ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard the prosaically named
Ad Astra
shuttle number two. In this brave little ship we will soon be descending to the
planet of another star . . .’

The passenger cabin had no windows. But now, over McGregor’s shoulder, through that pilots’ window, as the shuttle drifted, Yuri could see more of the planet: the grey shield of what
looked like an ocean, floating masses of ice, a terminator separating night from day, a diorama shifting by.

‘Our descent will be straightforward. We will be landing at a predesignated site in the north-east quadrant of the planet’s substellar face. We’ll come down on what looks like
a dry lake bed, just like the salt flats at Edwards Air Force Base in California where I completed my own flight training some years ago. Perfectly safe, a natural runway.

‘Our landing routine will take two hours. I’m afraid you won’t be able to leave your chairs until we’re safely down and the wheels have stopped rolling. If you have any
biological requirements during the flight just let yourself go, you’ll notice you are wearing underwear adapted for the purpose. You will hardly be comfortable but it won’t be for long.
Also there are sick bags. I do hope there will be no monkey business from any of you during the flight,’ he said, sadly, gravely. ‘Obviously it would be futile; you could achieve
nothing but damage the craft and endanger yourself and your colleagues. We, the crew, incidentally, will be wearing pressure suits and parachutes, so you need not fear for our safety, whatever you
do.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Soon we’ll decouple, and then the deorbit burn will follow a few minutes later. Any questions? No? Enjoy the flight. After all,’ he mused, as
if an interesting thought had just struck him, ‘it will, I suppose, be the last flight any of you ever take.’ He retreated to his cabin.

Soon there were more bangs and jolts, a sound that Yuri had come to recognise as the firing of small attitude rockets. As the shuttle swung about, turning on its axis to the right, he could
sense that he was in a much less massive vessel than the reassuring bulk of the starship. There was silence in the passenger cabin, save for ragged, nervous breathing, and the usual space-travel
hiss of pumps and fans, a noise that had followed Yuri all the way from Mars – and, incredibly, the drone of somebody snoring. Yuri glanced around to see; it was Harry Thorne, from a Canadian
UNSA state, once an urban farmer, a heavy-set, imperturbable man.