Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘I don’t care.’ She turned to the man beside her. ‘How do I get off this thing?’

  Taller, with a spectacular shock of silver-grey hair, in his seventies perhaps, the ISF man looked down at her with a kind of exasperated weariness. ‘You don’t, I’m afraid. None of us do. As ought to have been explained to you. All aboard? Close that hatch.’ Automated systems responded.

  As soon as the chamber was sealed up Earthshine flickered into existence, blinking, solidifying, clarifying in a whir of pixels. He looked down at his hand, flexed it, touched his face. ‘I have successfully interfaced with the ship’s systems, it seems. That was quick.’

  ‘We are the ISF, sir,’ said the officer. He bowed, which was the correct protocol with virtual representations, and Earthshine bowed back. ‘Welcome aboard the good ship Tatania. I’m General Lex McGregor, ISF; I’m to be your pilot. We have a small crew whom you’ll meet in due course. Now we must get on. If you’ll accompany me to the bridge . . .’

  The door behind him slid open to reveal an elevator cage, and they crowded in. Soon they were riding up the axis of the craft. Earthshine lost no definition inside the elevator, no protocol-violation flinches, no blurring of pixels. Good interfacing indeed, Penny thought.

  McGregor grinned at her, handsome despite his age. ‘So. Kalinski.’

  ‘Lex. Good to see you again.’

  ‘I’ve followed your career with interest all these years. And your sister. Nobody who flies a kernel ship can be unaware of the papers published under the Kalinski names, jointly or otherwise.’

  ‘Depends which reality stream you’re talking about.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Never mind.’ She said to the others, ‘The General and I go back a long way, to Mercury. My sister and I were about eleven years old, and my father was preparing to launch his Angelia probe to Alpha. And you—’

  ‘And I was on the maiden voyage of the International-One. Just a snot-nosed kid at the time.’

  Earthshine glanced over his spotless uniform. ‘I doubt you were ever snot-nosed, General McGregor.’

  Beth Eden Jones glared at them all, furious, frustrated, killing the small talk with her sheer hostility.

  The elevator slowed to a halt, and the door slid open. Penny found herself on what was obviously a bridge, with a big command chair surrounded by banks of consoles. There were no windows, and the lights were subdued so the illumination of the control panels was bright. A couple of crew members, young, one male, one female, in ISF uniforms, were already working steadily through a series of checks. There was an air of calm, of order, as if they were in a tremendous clockwork device ticking through programmed motions.

  Penny recognised one item of decoration: the bizarre concrete panel that had once adorned the wall of Earthshine’s office in Paris, much eroded and incised with circles and grooves, now fixed to the wall of a starship. Penny had no idea what its significance was.

  Lex McGregor hurried to his control couch. ‘We launch momentarily. Please strap yourselves in.’ He waved at a bank of couches against one wall. ‘I know it’s all rather a rush, we haven’t even shown you around the ship – well, we’ll have time for that once we’re on our way. To give you a sense of the hasty timing, the passenger buses that brought you aboard are still nuzzled up against the ship. Poor little beasts will be atomised when we lift. But given the proximity of those Chinese warships – we must get away safely, that’s the only priority. Please, sit down and strap in, do hurry.’

  They made for the couches, all save Beth Eden Jones, who stood in the middle of the cabin, hands on hips. ‘This is insane. Stop your count. I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘I’m very much afraid that you are.’ McGregor, already working through his own countdown checks, glanced over his shoulder. ‘Mr Jiang, I wonder if you could help?’

  Jiang nodded, walked over to Beth and took her arm. ‘The ship will launch whether you are seated or not. If you are not strapped in you may come to harm. Please.’ Gently, firmly, he pulled her towards the couches.

  She followed, but she kept protesting. ‘This is ridiculous. It’s all been chaos since I got stuffed into that Hatch with my parents at the Hub on Ardua. I wanted to go back with my father, but my mother put a stop to that.’ Her voice became harsher, more resentful. ‘I was stuck in this damn cluttered system with your big ugly overbright sun, your stupid crowded worlds full of ruins and skinny people and useless, distracting tech . . . And now this.’ Jiang got her to a couch and started coaxing her to sit. ‘I was with my mother on Mercury, the big ISF plant at Caloris. They took me away in cuffs!’

  McGregor, distracted, murmured, ‘Your mother was rather insistent. She believes it’s for the best, you know. She wants to keep you safe, that’s all.’

  ‘Safe from what? What the hell’s going to happen to Mercury?’

  ‘I’ve no real idea. My security clearance isn’t that high. I imagine your mother was making educated guesses, when she asked me to ensure your safety—’

  ‘What’s it got to do with you?’

  McGregor grimaced. ‘Ancient history. She said I owed her a favour. On balance I decided she was right. Are you strapped in?’

  ‘She is,’ Jiang said, settling in his own couch beside Penny and the Earthshine virtual.

  ‘Then we’re all set. On my mark – thirty, twenty-nine . . .’

  The craft shuddered, rocking Penny sideways in her couch. ‘What the hell was that? An earthquake?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ McGregor touched a panel.

  One of the screens filled up with a visual feed. The lunar plain was sharp to the horizon. And in the black sky above there was a ripple of light, reflections of moonlight washing over a roughly spherical panel.

  ‘More junks,’ Earthshine said.

  ‘Yep. And they’ve already started hurling down rocks. As if getting their range. They know we’re here, that’s for sure. Well, they’re too late. Seven, six . . . Now they’re going to need to concentrate on getting out of our way. Full acceleration coming. Two, one – fire!’

  The whole ship shuddered. Suddenly a full Earth gravity was sitting on Penny’s chest, pressing her back in the couch. On the big screen, the lunar landscape whipped out of sight, leaving only a black sky, a star field that shifted as the ship rolled on its axis. As the ship lifted, the ride smoothed out quickly.

  ‘Tatania is under way,’ said Lex McGregor softly. Penny saw him clench his gloved fist in triumph.

  Penny found herself thinking of Beth’s mother. Mardina Jones, an ISF officer abandoned by the fleet to become a baby machine on Per Ardua. And now here she was dispatching her only daughter off into deep space. That must have been a hell of a wrench, Penny thought. What did Mardina know? What did she see coming, that she wanted to save her daughter from so badly?

  The craft shuddered, and the acceleration bit deeper, making her gasp. Once again Penny grabbed Jiang’s hand, and he squeezed tight.

  CHAPTER 84

  ‘It’s coming,’ said Monica Trant. ‘The Nail. We’ve seen it. Here it is.’

  Mardina Jones didn’t want to believe what she was seeing in the slate Trant was holding, even as Trant, now in her seventies and still working, a deputy director of UEI’s kernel facility here at the Caloris base on Mercury, walked her through a diagrammatic reconstruction of orbits and trajectories.

  Around them, as they tried to talk, everybody was evacuating the facility. There was panic everywhere in the dome, people running, their feet paddling at the ground in the one-third gravity, hauling personal luggage, boxes, precious slates loaded with a career’s work tucked into pouches at their belts. Many of them already had pressure suits on, ready to flee for the transports that were assembling to take them off, to escape from the blow to be struck by this ‘Nail’.

  But Mardina didn’t want to go anywhere. Mardina was an ISF officer, or she had been before her two decades on Per Ardua, and now she was again, having taken up her duties once more on returning through t
he Hatch. Most recently she had been assigned to the top-secret technology offices here on Mercury to advise on renovations of hulk ship designs.

  She was an ISF officer. She always had been, always would be, despite the ISF’s own betrayal. And ISF officers didn’t run from their duty. She dug deep inside for focus, for personal discipline. Her own safety wasn’t the issue just now, and hadn’t been for a long time. She wanted to stay right here, in the kernel facility’s main comms room, until she was assured that Beth was on board that big old hulk taking off from the moon, as Lex McGregor had promised her, and the hulk itself was on its way out of this damn inner-system war zone at last, and safe from the Nail. That was her duty now.

  Trant was still talking.

  Mardina looked at her. Trant, about her own age, looked just as scared as Mardina – more so, no doubt, since she understood what was going on so much better. ‘I’m sorry. Tell me again . . .’

  The Nail: the ugly weapon that the Chinese had launched at Mercury.

  ‘We knew the Chinese were cooking something up at Ceres. Our intelligence there even gave us a name – hence “the Nail”. Now it’s on the way. Look. These are deep-space images taken over three days ago. This is what the Chinese assembled at Ceres, after the abortive UN attempt to attack their base with ISF hulk ships . . .’

  The assault had failed because of Chinese subterfuge. Long before the attack their special services had infiltrated the hulk crews. There was a brief firefight, hulk against hulk, a deep-space battle between huge ships capable of ferocious acceleration and carrying powerful missiles, an extraordinary spectacle in itself.

  But it had been over in minutes, leaving a handful of survivor ships, all in Chinese hands. Ferries had come out from Ceres to take survivors off the wrecks. And meanwhile tugs had sailed out to drag the operational ships into a quickly improvised dry dock, just a big scaffolding frame in space, where they used the UN craft to build – something else.

  ‘It’s fantastically crude,’ Trant said. ‘You can see what they did, just lined up the hulks in a bank, side by side, coupled them with these struts here. Parallel burners. But each burner is a fully fledged interplanetary kernel-powered hulk ship.’

  ‘And this is the Nail.’

  ‘That’s right. We don’t know if it’s crewed or not. Probably it is; there wouldn’t have been time to automate the thing fully before it was fired off, just hours after the battle was concluded. A kamikaze mission, right? They evidently planned this, even before they boarded the ISF ships, they prepared for it, they had everything ready. Probably work continued on the combined craft even after launch out of Ceres, although that would have been difficult under the one-gravity thrust that prevailed.’

  ‘One gravity?’

  ‘Yes. And they’ve kept that up for more than three days. Look at this trajectory chart . . .’ She tapped her slate.

  It took Mardina a moment to understand what she was seeing: five concentric circles centred on a yellow disc, a straight line cutting across from the fifth circle out from the centre to the innermost.

  ‘This is the solar system,’ Monica Trant said. ‘Obviously. The paths of the planets, out to Ceres. Just schematic, but the markings show the planets’ current relative positions in their orbit. And this straight line—’

  ‘The trajectory of the Nail.’ Mardina was old enough to have been brought up on pre-kernel, pre-hulk spacecraft trajectories. Low-energy trajectories followed sections of ellipses, orbits like the planets’; you glided powerless along a curve from one world to the next, with a minor blip of a rocket engine at either end. A hulk ship, though, a craft that could accelerate at a whole gravity for days, weeks on end, crossed interplanetary space in straight lines. ‘You know, I worked in astronavigation. On a starship, for God’s sake. But we never drove a hulk ship across the solar system. We never made tracks like this.’ Mardina counted the orbits. ‘And this is the Nail’s trajectory. From Ceres straight to Mercury.’

  ‘Damn right.’

  Mardina tried to remember her astronomical distances; Ceres was over two astronomical units out from the sun, more than twice as far as Earth, whereas Mercury was less than half an AU out. You had the relative positions in their orbits to take account of too. But after three days at constant one-G acceleration –

  She looked at Trant, horrified. ‘It must be nearly here.’

  ‘Only hours away. It’s been on a straight-line track for Mercury, indeed for this location on Mercury, this facility, since it was launched. The projections show it clearly. And it hasn’t deviated once.

  ‘I think they’ve decided to take out the Caloris facility – the kernel-processing facilities, maybe even the Hatch. It’s kind of dog-in-the-manger; if we won’t share the kernel tech then nobody gets to use it. But there are precedents. In the past, states, or even organisations like the UN, have mandated strikes against rogue states to take out nuke facilities, for instance, before they had a chance to be used . . .’

  Even faced with this blunt revelation, Mardina found it hard to take in. She’d heard hints of a threat to Mercury, the kernel plants, something coming this way. That had been enough for her to ship Beth as far out of the inner system as she could. But she’d imagined some kind of invasion, an attempt to take the Caloris base. She’d never imagined anything like this attempt at wilful destruction. ‘They’ve been in flight three days. They must have been seen by UN surveillance systems. Why has there been no warning to the staff?’

  Trant pulled a face, weary, cynical. ‘This is a UEI facility. The UEI has a habit of secrecy. Anyhow, we thought it was a bluff. We thought they’d pull away, veer off after giving us a scare, having shown us what they can do. I guess they might still.’

  ‘But you’ve decided not to bank on it. And that isn’t some damn V-2.’ Again she tried to figure the numbers in her head. ‘After three days at a full G, they must be travelling at—’

  ‘About one per cent the speed of light. And those hulk ships are pretty massive. That’s a lot of kinetic energy.’

  ‘It’s a relativistic missile, is what it is. And they’ve unleashed it in the middle of the inner solar system? How could they even think of this?’

  Monica Trant took her shoulders and stared in her face. ‘Mardina, the whole future of mankind pivots on this moment, these few hours and days. That’s how they can think of this. If they lose this game, they’ve lost for ever, because we’d have a monopoly on the kernels. Maybe we’d do the same, if the position was reversed. Probably would. You feel outrage? I feel outrage. Keep it for later. Meanwhile we have to get to one of the transports; they’re not going to wait.’

  Something in Mardina broke at last. They started to run for the exit from the dome.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she called to Trant. ‘I kept you behind.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it. You were concerned for your girl. I’m a mother too. My son’s on Earth, in one of the new northern cities.’

  ‘The Earth’s supposed to be protected—’

  ‘That’s the theory.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll be safe?’

  Monica Trant shrugged as she ran, stiffly. ‘Rob’s a cop. They get weapons, the first pick of the available food, shelter. If he’s not safe down there nobody is.’

  They reached a port in the dome wall, a surface tunnel leading to a transport craft out of here. But there was a crowd already here, a queue in the tunnel. Trant flashed a rank card to force their way through the line, but soon the people were jammed in so tight there was no way to get forward except to shuffle along with the herd.

  People: they were all around Mardina, ISF crew and UEI personnel, scientists and administrators, mechanics and cooks and cleaners, the whole community that had sustained itself under this dome, all draining towards a handful of airlocks like this one, trying to escape. Children too, lanky low-gravity children born in a dome under the solar fire during their parents’ long-duration stays here on Mercury. Mardina had spent only a short time here since returning fro
m Earth, but she was surprised how many she recognised. People: each one a fully rounded consciousness, each with a past, memories, hopes for the future, each with a mesh of family and friends and enemies, loves and loyalties, rivalries and hatreds. All jammed up arbitrarily in this tube like overflow baggage, with a relativistic missile coming down on their heads.

  Trant murmured, ‘We’re using every which way to get out of here. If we make it out at all, we’ll be loaded onto a surface-to-surface bug. Even that has enough push to get us off the planet at least, for pick-up later. Any way to get people off the surface and scattered, we’re using. We’re even piling people into cargo pods and using the mass driver.’

  Mardina, even as they worked their way through the crush, was still trying to figure out the implications of this assault. ‘The Nail is coming right down on top of the facility, right? Which itself sits on top of the densest concentration of kernels, and the Hatch structure itself.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So what’s the Nail going to do to the planet?’

  Trant shrugged. ‘We don’t have good models. Partly because nobody took it seriously, despite the Chinese sending us endless warnings to evacuate. And since people have started taking it seriously, we’ve all been too busy running. At least a major impact; one of our experts thinks it will be like another Caloris. Which was a punch that created a crater that spanned one whole hemisphere, with a rebound at the antipode where waves in the surface rock converged. Which is why we want to get everybody off the planet altogether, if we can, even if it’s going to be a heck of a retrieval operation later.’

  ‘But what about the kernels? I mean, energies like that—’

  There was no time for Trant to reply. With a last shove, Mardina found herself at the head of a suddenly clearing queue. Two ISF officers, one male, one female, both uniformed, both armed, stood here, blocking the lock to the ship beyond. One grabbed Mardina’s arm and pulled her inside the ship, muttering a count, and then the other officer swung down his arm like a barrier. ‘That’s it, full to capacity.’ He pressed a button. The officers held their place, arms linked, before the closing door. ‘No more room. Try another exit, or wait here for another craft . . .’