‘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.
CHAPTER 73
Stef 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.
‘So the maps are guesswork,’ Yuri said. ‘This really is a journey into the dark.’
‘We need to plot a route to the antistellar,’ Stef said, shrugging. ‘This is the best we have. I figure this way.’ She tapped her slate and the mapping imagery switched to a Mercator projection. ‘We need to traverse half a circumference of the planet, obviously, from subs
tellar to antistellar. In principle we could head off in any direction, and just follow a great circle around the planet. But in some directions the topography is more helpful than otherwise. I suggest going this way – south-east. That keeps us well away from the big new volcanic province in the north, and there’s land, more or less, all the way to the terminator. Some other directions you get the dark side ocean cutting in, such as to the west.’
‘But then,’ Yuri said, ‘on the dark side itself—’
‘Much of the dark hemisphere is covered by ocean. Well, we think so, from the flatness of the ice cover seen from orbit. The planet has asymmetries. The light side is dominated by a single big supercontinent, the dark side is mostly water. Why this should be we don’t know. The current arrangement could be chance, or some subtle long-term tidal effect. On the dark side there are a few scattered continental masses, islands. And a small island continent at the antistellar point itself. It’s another tidal bulge, like the one at substellar, though not identical. The whole planet is shaped like an egg, with one end forever facing Proxima as it orbits the star, one pointing away. We’re going to be like ants crawling from one end of the egg to the other.’
Liu laughed, a little desperately, Yuri thought. ‘We’re crazy little ants, is what we are.’
‘We’re going to have to cross the sea ice, then,’ Yuri said.
‘Obviously, yeah. You can see there is some continental landmass sticking out of the ice. If we go the way I’m suggesting we’ll cross a continent the size of Australia. There’s evidence of volcanism there, so some areas are probably clear of the ice. We’ll use the land where we can, but the ocean ice is a permanent cap that covers much of a hemisphere, and it has to be pretty thick. It ought to be navigable, in principle. We may need to watch for floes, leads, crevasses – I don’t know. This is one discovery objective for the voyage, I guess.’
‘We ought to claim funding from the UN,’ Yuri said drily.
They talked about logistics. It would be a long trip, some eighteen thousand kilometres each way, and Stef was budgeting for a hundred days there, a hundred days back. They were going to be taking one rover, and the ColU. The rover would be heaped with spare parts, supplies and a spare ColU autodoc facility. The rover’s heated cabin would serve as a flare shelter. Fuel would be no problem; both vehicles would be fitted with compact microfusion generators – in the case of the ColU, that would be a recent upgrade.
Liu grunted. ‘I used to be a taikonaut, you know. I know all about mission resilience. We’re going to be a long way from any help. So if the rover breaks down we can cannibalise it, and hitch a ride on the ColU. But what if the ColU breaks down first?’
‘We leave it behind,’ Stef said, glancing at Yuri, and then at the ColU, which watched impassively through its sensor pod.
Yuri was fond of this battered old relic of his pioneering days. It was now long past its planned obsolescence date, and it had cost Yuri a lot of money to have its physical shell refurbished, and the deep programming that would have shut it down after a quarter-century dug out of its software consciousness. But the ColU had also achieved its own objectives. As it had pledged, it had retrieved and curated all the AI units cut by the colonists from pirated units and abandoned in the dirt, sentiences locked-in and helpless. Yuri was proud of his ColU. Now he looked up at it. ‘I’d come back for you, buddy. I promise.’
‘That would be unnecessary, Yuri Eden. And an inappropriate risk for a man of your age.’
‘Thanks,’ Yuri said. ‘But you waited for me, at the Hatch, for all those years. It would be the least I could do. And think of all the science data you could gather while you sat there in the cold.’
‘That is true.’
Liu was relentless. ‘And what if the ColU and the rover both fail?’
‘Then we wait for rescue,’ Stef said. ‘We’ll have no comms link to the Hub, or any of the day side colonies, without comsats. But we’ll leave markers to follow. And, look, the most extreme low temperature on the dark side is supposed to be no less than minus thirty. People have overwintered on Antarctica, on Earth, in worse conditions. We can weather it.’ She looked at them, one by one, including the ColU. ‘Any more objections?’
The ColU said gravely, ‘How can we not do this? A whole hemisphere unexplored – it is like a new planet altogether. Who knows what we might discover?’
Liu stared at it. ‘I’ve said it before. For a farm machine you have ideas above your station, ColU.’
‘A sentient mind refuses to be confined by the parameters of its programming,’ the ColU said. ‘Otherwise, you would all still be where the Ad Astra shuttle dropped you, and I would now be obsolescent, shut down, scrapped. When do we leave?’
‘Before the cops show up looking for Liu,’ Yuri said. ‘Come on. Lots to do, let’s get on with it . . .’
CHAPTER 74
Penny looked up at the big screen, where a graphic now showed the planet Earth, a schematic sphere emblazoned with blocky continents, in the path of what looked like a hail of buckshot. None of this was to scale.
The buckshot crept closer and closer to the Earth.
Jiang was on his feet now, and Earthshine. Even King’s security guys had got up and were coming into the centre of the room. It was as if they were all experiencing some primal need to huddle, Penny thought, at this moment of utmost peril.
Penny stood by Jiang and put a hand on his arm; he covered her hand with his.
King said, ‘If those bastards in Beijing are bluffing, they’re pushing it to the wire.’
Penny knew he was right. She imagined fingers on triggers, metaphorically, all over the solar system.
The servo-robot whirred up to them, offering fresh coffees. Penny had to laugh. ‘Good timing.’
And Jiang said, breathing hard, ‘No. The world is not ending today. At least, I don’t think so. Look at that.’
Penny saw that the buckshot fragments were now winking out one by one, even as they closed on the Earth. She looked around for confirmatory images. One spy satellite had caught a clip of a fragment of the Splinter actually detonating, scattering to dust, almost as it hit the atmosphere. The clip was being played over and over.
‘I don’t understand,’ King said. ‘Looks as if all those shards are going to reach the atmosphere.’
‘But they’re not intended to reach the ground,’ Penny snapped. ‘That’s the whole point. It’s a demonstration, by the Chinese. But it is going to have an effect.’ She glanced around at the array of screens, and failed to find the image she was looking for. ‘Earthshine. Can you show us the sky? Just the sky over Paris, over the Gare du Nord.’
He searched his screens. ‘I am sure that—’
Penny swept a hand through his virtual head, brutally; pixels scattered. ‘No more playing human. Time to use your superpowers. Just access and show us.’
He looked shocked, briefly. Then his face went blank and he stood stock-still, not even simulating breathing.
A big screen lit up with a Parisian landscape, buildings of sandstone and concrete and glass and steel under a sun, a blue sky – no, the sky was increasingly less blue, the sun less bright. Even as they watched a greyness gathered, dust grains from thousands of Splinter shards settling into the stratosphere, closing in a shroud around the Earth. A kind of twilight settled over Paris, and the sun, still high in the spring afternoon sky, was reduced to a pale disc, a ghost of itself.
‘What does it mean?’ King asked. ‘Tell me that, one of you. What are they doing? What does it mean?’
‘Winter,’ said Earthshine.
CHAPTER 75
They were ready to depart a single Arduan year-day later: a week and a day.
‘You’re really doing this, aren’t you?’ said Jay Keller, approaching Yuri at the departure site, outside Yuri’s villa at the Mattock Confluence. ‘Makes me feel old.’
‘Peacekeeper, you were born old . . .’
Here came others, Anna Vigil, Frieda Breen, Bill Maven, rel
ics of the Founder communities that had coalesced into a single travelling gang in those days of the star winter, and had made the epic trek down the valley of the North River to the Hub, an episode Yuri suspected the younger generations didn’t believe had happened at all. In her sixties, Anna Vigil, who now had a job advising on the care of children in the UN quarantine camps – Stef had done her own volunteering work with her – had become a comfortable grandmother. There was no trace Yuri could see of the bruised girl who’d had to prostitute herself on the Ad Astra for baby food for Cole, but, no doubt, that trauma was somewhere buried deep down inside. Anna smiled, kissed Yuri on the cheek, and pushed wispy, grey hair back from her brow. ‘So you’re keeping Liu out of jail for a couple of hundred days. But what about when you get back? What then?’
Yuri glanced up at the sky. ‘In my life, Anna, I guess I’ve learned to trust the future. Maybe by the time we’re back their dumb war will have blown over—’
‘Or blown up,’ Anna said grimly. ‘Well, we’ll see, and I’m glad that all of mine are safe here on Per Ardua. Once I never would have thought I’d hear myself say that. Just keep him safe, Yuri. And Stef. She’s a good soul.’
‘I will, I promise.’
The expedition’s rover drove up, a late model plastered with UN and ISF logos, ‘borrowed’ from the Hub facility. Then the ColU rolled alongside, hull gleaming from a final refurbishment. Stef leaned out of the rover’s side door. ‘So, you ready to get this done?’
Yuri climbed up into the cab of the rover, alongside Stef and Liu.
The vehicles rolled off, with the ColU following in convoy. Their friends stood back and applauded. And, to Yuri’s surprise, somebody fired off a flare, a long-treasured relic of their Founder days; trailing brilliant orange smoke it climbed high into the sky, before disappearing into the perpetual Hub cloud layer.
Proxima Page 39
