Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  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.
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br />   ‘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.

  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.’

  CHAPTER 9

  The 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, the
y 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.