Proxima (7 page)

Beyond the pilots’ window a second planet hung in the black now, more distant, a perfect sphere of silver-grey.

Lemmy leaned forward again. ‘Yuri. Listen. Watch everything. Observe. Remember. I mean, are they going to give us maps? Remember everything you can of this new world we’re heading
for—’

Yuri heard rather than saw Mattock’s fist hitting Lemmy’s jaw. ‘One more word, shithead, and I’ll lay you out for the duration.’

Now there was a roar, a gentle shove that pressed Yuri back into his seat.

It was a strange thing that Yuri had crossed interplanetary space, and then
interstellar
space, but he knew nothing about the mechanics of space flight. In his day the whole business of
flying in space had seemed unethical, just another sin committed in a previous energy-bloated age, and nobody even talked about it. He could only guess at what was going on.

The burn was soon over. Now the attitude rockets slammed again, once more the ship swivelled – he glimpsed that ocean, half-submerged in night, slide past the pilots’ window –
and then, nothing.

The seconds piled up into minutes. To Yuri it felt as if he was still in freefall. Behind him he heard somebody humming – it was the other Peacekeeper, not Mattock – and the rustle
of a paper bag. Those guys had done this run several times before, he guessed; they knew the routine. There was a fumble. ‘Damn.’ A couple of candy fragments came sailing over
Yuri’s head, from behind. Yuri stared, fascinated; he’d seen no candy since he’d gone into cryo on Earth. But the bright blue capsules were falling, he saw, a long slow curving
glide down to the floor. Acceleration building up.

There was a glow outside that forward window now, a dull crimson, then orange, and then, suddenly a dazzling white, like he was flying down some huge fluorescent tube. Yet there was no noise, no
shuddering or buffeting, no great sense of weight, not yet.

The glow quickly cleared to reveal a seascape, white ice floes on a steely ocean that faded into night. Then this panorama
tilted up
, sideways. No, of course, it was the shuttle that
was tipped up, almost standing on its right wing. And then, Yuri could feel it in his gut, the craft tipped the other way, and the landscape slid out of his view.

‘Holy shit,’ murmured someone else now, a woman ahead of Yuri, another businessperson called Martha Pearson, staring out of the forward window.

‘We’re gliding,’ Lemmy muttered through gritted teeth. ‘That’s all. No power now we’ve deorbited. Gliding down into the atmosphere of this world. Shedding our
speed in friction against the upper air in these big rolls and banks . . .’

Mattock growled a warning, but indistinctly; maybe he was distracted himself.

Suddenly they flew into night. Now there was only darkness below, that landscape hidden. Yuri could feel the gravity mounting up, and he lay back on his couch. Still the pressure piled on until
it felt like some enormous Peacekeeper was sitting on his chest, and there was blackness around the edge of his vision, closing in. But now there was a pressure in his legs, around his waist; his
undergarment was clamping him hard, pressing back his belly button.

‘Clench!’ shouted Lemmy. ‘Clench your gut! It will help stop you blacking out . . .’

Yuri tried it, crunching down hard. It felt like his whole waist was being constricted by some terrifically tight belt. But it worked, his vision cleared.

Now he could hear a rush of air, of wind – this spaceship really had become an airplane – and they flew suddenly into daylight once more, from day to night in an instant. Raising his
head, he glimpsed through the pilots’ window a big watery sun that dazzled him, and a twilit land below, then more ice floes, more ocean, all bathed in a ruddy glow.

‘Your last sunrise!’ Lemmy yelled.

Yuri didn’t know what he meant.

There was a shudder, a bang, and the ride abruptly got a lot more bumpy. The shuttle glided on down through air that felt lumpy, full of turbulence, like they were flying through a field of
invisible rocks. But now, Yuri saw, looking forward, he was flying towards land again. A coast-line fled beneath, fringed by white-capped waves, and then what looked like a belt of forest, a furry
fringe of a dismal drab green, and then more arid country, it seemed, dust and sand and dunes.

Remember it all, Lemmy had said. Yuri tried. But he didn’t even know which way he was flying. West to east? Did directions like that even make any sense on this world?

They flew over cloud now, a great curdled bank of it, grey-white, twisted like a tremendous tornado, he thought. Through breaks in the cloud he glimpsed another clump of strange dark forest.
Then they were back over the open country, with only scattered cloud below, and Yuri saw a river snaking away from that stormy region, a silver ribbon laid across the rust-coloured land.

They descended further, following that river, and now the land below seemed to rush beneath the shuttle. Yuri peered down, searching for detail. He thought he saw movement on the ground: the
shadow of a cloud? But cloud shadows didn’t raise dust . . .

The river reached a sea, at a broad, sluggish estuary. The craft banked once more and, very low now, came back over the shore, over the estuary, and descended towards a flat, dusty country
broken here and there by small lakes, and in the further distance a belt of forest. The descent seemed rapid now. Yuri could see fine details, individual rocks fleeing beneath the ship. The shuttle
shuddered and tipped in the turbulent alien air. Yuri, clinging to the cuffs that held him in his seat, endured the jolting, and heard the clatter of fittings, loose panels, harness holders. Up
front, somebody was noisily sick.

And they were
down
, suddenly, a crashing impact after which they bounced into the air, and slammed down again with a squeal of tyres and another sudden jolt of deceleration, this time
hurling Yuri forward against his straps.

The shuttle slowed to a halt. The dust it raised soon fell back to the plain outside, revealing a washed-out blue sky, a rocky, stony ground.

Immediately Lex McGregor came bustling back through the cockpit door. He was pulling open the neck of his pressure suit; Yuri could see he was sweating hard. ‘Wheel stop and we’re
down. You know, it was one small step for a man when Armstrong landed on the moon. But for you lot it’s one
last
step – right? The end of the line. Welcome to Proxima
c.’

T
he two astronauts went out first, of course.

Then the Peacekeepers released the passengers one by one, and escorted them out of the cabin. With an attendant Peacekeeper, they had to pass one at a time through an airlock, even though the
air was supposedly breathable; the lock was evidently integral to the shuttle’s design.

Yuri waited for his turn, disoriented, bewildered – too mixed up, he thought, to be either fearful or excited about setting foot on this alien world. Maybe that would come later. Or not.
After all, countless generations had dreamed of reaching Mars, and that had turned out to be a shithole.

At last it was his turn. Mattock cuffed Yuri to his own wrist, and tied his ankles with a length of plastic rope. Thus hobbled, Yuri shuffled ahead to the airlock, and climbed awkwardly through
the narrow hatch, into the small chamber of the lock.

While the lock went through its cycle he sat on a small bench, facing a glowering Mattock.

‘Just give me an excuse,’ said Mattock.

Yuri grinned back.

A green light glared, and the outer hatch door popped open. Yuri saw a ground of pink-grey sand, individual grains casting long shadows. The air smelled of aircraft, of fuel and oil and a kind
of burned smell of metal. But under that there was a subtler scent, an old, rusty tang, like autumn leaves in an English park, he thought.

Mattock nudged him. ‘You first.’

Yuri had to swing both his hobbled legs out through the hatch, and then he jumped down through a third of a metre or so to the ground, both his feet hitting at the same time. It felt like Earth
gravity, he thought immediately, or about that.

He was in the shadow of the shuttle’s sprawling, still hot, jet-black wing.

He shuffled forward a few paces, into sunlight, and he looked up for the first time at the star, the sun of this world. It was a tremendous beacon in a bluish sky, not as brilliant as the sun of
Earth, but still dazzling, and bigger to look at, three or four times the size of Earth’s sun. Other than that the sky was empty, save for a pair of brilliant stars, shining despite the
bright daylight, and one disc of a planet hanging like a remote moon.

The other disembarked passengers were sitting in a circle in the dirt, a few paces from the shuttle. Mattock prodded Yuri to go join them. He edged forward, looking around as he walked. Beyond
the group, he saw a lake glimmer, blue under the sky. Beyond that, a drab green belt that must be forest. And beyond that, folded mountains. There was no sign of people, no walls, no fences as far
as he could see. No dome walls, like on Mars.

Lieutenant Mardina Jones stood over the passengers. She said to Yuri, ‘The air’s fine, isn’t it? A miracle, really. Given it’s another world, and all.’

‘I guess.’

She watched him curiously. ‘You know, Eden, you’re the only one who’s just stood here and – looked.’ She squinted up at the sun. ‘Strange to think, that sun
will just hang there. Never rise, never set, not as long as you live.’

‘Really?’

She stared at him. ‘All those briefings we gave. You really have learned nothing, have you?’

‘Where’s everybody else?’

‘Who?’

‘The other groups. Brought down by the shuttle before us.’

‘A long way from here. Major McGregor will tell you all about it. In the meantime you go sit over there with those others. We’ve got supplies to unload for our stay here, and for
your first few weeks and months as residents. Also a ColU.’

Yuri didn’t know what a ColU was. ‘And then you’re going?’

She slapped the hull of the shuttle. ‘This bird will scramjet its way back to the sky – yes, we’re going. Now, if I release your hobble will you go and sit with the
rest?’

‘Yes.’

She bent down, took a knife from her belt, and slit through the hobble.

He took a step towards the seated group. Then another step, and another, and then broke into a run. A jog really, it was awkward with his hands tied together, but he could do this. He ran,
stretching his legs, the dirt firm under his booted feet.

Ran right past the seated group, who whooped and hollered.

He heard voices behind him. ‘Hey, ice boy! Stop or—’

‘Or what, Mattock? You going to run him down? Ah, let him go. I mean, where’s he going to run to? A thousand klicks to the next group? He’ll be back. Look, give me a hand with
this food pack . . .’

And Yuri ran and ran, on beyond the dust kicked up by the shuttle on landing, on over the virgin dirt, on far beyond the bounds of any cramped little Martian colony like Eden – on until
their voices were small behind him, and when he looked back the shuttle sitting on its undercarriage looked like a black-and-white toy on a tabletop – on towards that forest, and the
mountains.

That was why he was the last to hear that, sometime during the descent when attentions were otherwise engaged, Abbey Brandenstein had stabbed Joseph Mullane in the heart with a sharpened plastic
toothbrush.

2155

O
n Angelia’s last night in the human world, Dr Kalinski cherished her. That was how she thought of it, on later reflection.

Still in the form of her weighty humanoid body, she was taken to dinner with Dr Kalinski and his daughter Stef, and members of the control crew who would care for her during her ten-year flight
to Proxima: people like Bob Develin and Monica Trant, competent twenty- or thirty-somethings, all employees of national space agencies now subsumed into a global UN agency which only the Chinese,
their Framework partners and a few outliers like North Britain had declined to join. ‘Only’: much of interplanetary space travel, in fact, was dominated by the new Chinese empire. They
spoke openly, loosely, treating Angelia as one of the crew, as
human
, sometimes even speaking as if she wasn’t there at all, which paradoxically made her feel more welcome, more
included.

But she learned more about their concerns regarding the mission than Dr Kalinski had told her about before. That perhaps it was obsolete, technologically, before it was even launched, given the
UEI kernel developments. That it wasn’t very popular politically in higher circles in the UN: it had a whiff of the Heroic Generation, whose projects had been characterised by massive,
wasteful engineering, and loaded with AIs of a quality of sentience that had later been made illegal retrospectively. After all, Dr Kalinski had grown up in the wake of the Generation and their
mighty works; maybe he was influenced by them. So the whispers went.

Dr Kalinski had done his best to shield his project from those criticisms. Yes, he had needed some big-scale equipment, but even though he had reused a solar-power station, itself a much-hated
relic of the past Heroic age with its hubristic planetary engineering schemes, he would use energies of orders of magnitude
less
than those that had hurled Dexter Cole to Proxima. As for
profit, Dr Kalinski eschewed any cash rewards save for the salary he drew from the academic institutions that employed him. Any patentable technologies would be owned and exploited by those
institutions, on behalf of the UN-governed taxpayers that supported them. And, yes, Angelia was an advanced, sentient AI, the mission could not have been achieved without smart onboard technology.
She was capable of suffering – that was the price of sentience. But the mission was designed to sustain her, Dr Kalinski said, to deliver her to Proxima Centauri alive and sane. She was being
honoured, not mistreated.