Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  The excluded people seemed shocked, too bewildered to react to this abandonment. Among them was a child who screamed, yelled for his mother with arms outstretched, but he was held back by a young man, maybe his father.

  And Mardina had left behind Monica Trant, on the wrong side of the ISF officers.

  Mardina tried to get back to her. ‘Oh, hell, Monica, this is my fault, I slowed you down—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll be fine. Stay safe.’ The lock door was already swinging closed, and Trant had to duck to maintain eye contact with Mardina. ‘And listen, if you get the chance, tell my son Rob that—’

  The hatch clicked closed. The ISF officers, sweating, breathing hard, glanced at each other and backed away.

  ‘Hell of a thing,’ said the woman to the man.

  ‘Too damn right.’ The man turned and raised his voice to address the passengers. ‘Please find a couch. If you can’t find a couch, wedge yourself in somewhere, we are over capacity. We lift immediately.’ He and his colleague made for the rear of the cabin, near the hatch to the corridor, and folded couches out of the wall.

  Mardina, bereft, bewildered by the sudden transition from the crowded space to the interior of this craft, pushed her way in. She had ridden these bugs many times. They were just hoppers that took you from dome to dome, squirting their way over Mercury’s surface on feeble chemical-propellant rockets. You rode them at shift changes, at dome-morning or dome-night, when going to see a colleague, or travelling from a dormitory block to a workplace. Now the interior of the bus, with its curving walls and soothing beige colour scheme, had never seemed so small, so crowded was it with people, all scrambling to get to the few remaining couches. You weren’t meant to be fleeing for your life in a vessel like this.

  Mardina found a place by the wall, next to a couch where a young woman cradled her baby, and sat on the carpeted floor with her feet jammed against a strut.

  She had barely settled when the bug lifted with a lurch, much more roughly than she remembered from any early morning commute. People gasped or called out; a few who weren’t safely strapped into couches stumbled and fell to the floor. A baby started crying. And the lift went on and on, not like a commute hop, this was a single mighty leap which would, when the fuel was exhausted, fling them away from Mercury altogether – where they would drift in space until picked up, if they ever were.

  Mardina wondered how long was left until the impact of the Nail.

  And she thought about the kernels.

  She knew that kernels were like tiny wormholes, leaking energy, that could be manipulated open and closed with lasers and magnetic fields. Had anybody done any modelling of what might become of the kernels, and the energy they channelled, when the Nail was driven into the Mercury ground? Presumably the Chinese couldn’t have; they were supposed to have no access to kernel physics anyhow. Maybe they thought this was just a surgical strike. Closing the lid of the UN’s treasure trove: nothing more destructive than that. But if not . . .

  Mardina still had her slate, in its pouch at her waist. As the clumsy craft’s acceleration juddered on, as the passengers gradually quietened down, she dug out the slate, and looked up at the woman with the baby. ‘Excuse me. Can I use your comms link? The one on your couch . . .’

  The woman shrugged, holding her baby’s head against her chest.

  Mardina pulled down a small earpiece on a fibre-optic cable from the couch. She swiped it with her slate to give it her ID. The earpiece lit up, and she tucked it behind her ear. ‘I want to speak to my daughter. Beth Eden Jones.’ She swiped another ID, to identify Beth. ‘I know she’s on a hulk ship heading towards the outer system. I’ll record a message. I want you to keep trying to make the call until you get a response, right?’

  ‘Confirmed,’ replied a soft synthetic voice.

  So the solar system’s shared comms systems were still working, at least. She looked around, self-conscious. Nobody was paying any attention to her, but she ducked her head even so. ‘Hi, sweetheart, it’s your mother. You won’t believe where I am . . .’

  There was a streak of brilliant light, beyond the cabin walls, quite soundless, like a meteor falling. People turned, distracted.

  Still the bug ascended from Mercury, as smoothly as before.

  ‘If I get a chance I’ll tell you all about it. But the main thing is, I’m sorry I had to throw you at General Lex, even if he does owe me a favour. Wherever you end up I’ll come looking for you. Don’t forget that I’ll always

  CHAPTER 85

  Monitors in space and elsewhere observed the event, reconstructed its consequences later, and reported their conclusions to survivors. Or attempted to.

  The Nail hit the surface of Mercury, dead on target at the kernel-physics facility at Caloris, at one per cent of the speed of light.

  It delivered the kinetic energy of an asteroid three hundred metres across moving at interplanetary speeds. An energy load equivalent to all of Earth’s nuclear arsenals at the most dangerous moment of the twentieth-century Cold War. An energy load equivalent to a month of the planet’s entire output, in the most profligate days of the twenty-first century. All of this energy was injected into the upper crust of Mercury, and the kernel beds beneath, in less than a millisecond.

  The kernel facility, with a wide swathe of the crust, was utterly destroyed, rock vaporised to gas. The molten walls of a tremendous new crater rolled across this world’s battered surface.

  But the Nail’s fall was only the trigger. In response to the tremendous shock, in layers deep beneath the surface, kernels yawned open, like the mouths of baby birds. And a pulse of energy of an intensity never before seen in the solar system was unleashed, carried by a flood of short-wavelength photons, X-rays and gamma rays that fled the site at the speed of light, and then by a wavefront of massive particles, moving somewhat more slowly, but highly energetic themselves.

  After a fiftieth of a second the radiation pulse had passed through the body of Mercury. Across the face of the planet the rocky crust was liquefied, the human installations on the Mercury ground gone in a moment. Even the iron core roiled.

  After another fiftieth of a second the photon wave overwhelmed the fleeing surface-hopper bug, and the rest of the armada of fragile refugee ships, rising from the surface. To Mardina it was as if a light went off inside her head, inside her very skull.

  After eight minutes the photon shockwave reached Earth.

  CHAPTER 86

  Officer Rob Trant was on duty, cruising the east side of New Prudhoe, Alaska.

  He was well aware of the date, and the time. This was when the Nail was due to strike Mercury, as his mother Monica had warned him. But despite having this inside channel he didn’t know much more about the international crisis than any other cop in the country.

  They’d been briefed about fears of a backlash on Earth, whatever happened up in space: a rising by ethnic Chinese types in the cities, maybe, or some kind of revenge attacks taking place on them in turn. Whatever. Rob had seen nothing untoward so far, in the ruined suburbs he patrolled. But he knew the news of even the most dramatic events on Mercury would take long minutes to crawl out here at lightspeed.

  Personally he didn’t think anything would come of it. The whole Chinese winter thing had been a kind of bluff, after all.

  He knew his mother was in the centre of it, on Mercury he could never have persuaded her to come away. She had opened up to him more in recent days than for a long time, in fact more than since the moment he’d finally rebelled at his life under a dome on Mercury, and had cashed in his partially completed ISF training to become a cop on Earth. It was hard to have a decent conversation with the long minutes of light delay between the worlds. She’d promised him some kind of message today, a long missive. But the message hadn’t come, not yet.

  He missed his mother. He admitted it, in lonely moments. He was forty-two years old, had come to Earth in his twenties, had always been too much of an alien to make close friends, to fall in
love. He missed his mother’s company, but he didn’t feel concerned for her right now. He concentrated on his job.

  New Prudhoe was a sprawling conurbation less than seventy years old, the historic plaques and markers you saw everywhere told you that, a product of the great northern migrations of the last century. It felt like it was a lot older to Trant, especially in the neighbourhoods he worked, which had once been prosperous middle-class suburbs, thriving on the post-Jolt prosperity of this Arctic ocean coast. But now the Chinese winter had come and it went on and on, and the stores were closing, and people were losing their jobs and heading south for the duration, leaving behind only various deadbeats who couldn’t move or wouldn’t, and those who preyed on them, and cops. And then some other types had started coming back, with their own novel vices: most recently, hothead kids who had got addicted to Asgard and other live-action games, but had got bored with the simulation, bored with dying every day, and now wanted the thrill of the real thing. Well, today Rob felt relatively safe, in his armoured cruiser with its powerful weaponry and super-smart, ever-alert AI. Besides, it wasn’t long since the National Guard’s last clear-out, after a set-to confrontation when whole districts had burned.

  The Nail arrival time must have come and gone. He checked his watch, trying to remember how long the time lag was between Earth and Mercury just now.

  That was why he was thinking about his mother, when it came.

  The car had just turned down a long avenue, once the centrepiece of the new city in the post-Jolt recovery days, now with only a handful of cars, all automated, cruising its length. So, as it happened, he was looking south when the photon shockwave washed over Earth. Rob saw it as a wave of blinding light coming up from below the horizon, but soon filling the car, and his head.

  And suddenly his eyes felt like they were burning out of his head, and his vision went from dazzling white to utter black. He threw his arm over his face, crying out. He fumbled for the slate mounted on the dash, to call this in, this nuclear attack, whatever. He had to call it in. His eyes were pits of agony. He felt warm inside, like he’d been stuffed inside a microwave cooker . . .

  On the long, mostly empty highway, the cars cruised on quietly, calmly, in their straight lines, their onboard AIs taking over the controls from drivers who threshed and screamed, tearing at sightless eyes. Until the radiation began to fry their electronics, and they slewed aside.

  This was only the beginning. The particle storm, travelling slower than light, would not arrive for another two hours.

  CHAPTER 87

  Earthshine’s bunker remained calm, the staff working at their monitors and slates, recording, analysing, as the bad news from the sky filled the screens. Sir Michael King, walking stiffly with the aid of his stick, went around the staff individually, to reassure them that they were free to take a break, to try to contact family on the surface if they needed to. Most of them stayed where they were, as if by keeping on working, sticking to the routine, they were somehow holding the greater horror at bay.

  Now the screens showed a darkening, a thickening smog, cutting off the unbearable brilliance of the sky.

  King stormed into Earthshine’s central sanctum. ‘So what now? We had the flash – what next?’

  ‘Massive particles,’ said Earthshine – or at least the semi-transparent partial copy the primary had left behind when he fled on the Tatania. ‘The ozone layer is already gone. Ultraviolet and gamma rays are battering the surface of the Earth. As for life, basic cellular functions are being compromised.’ The virtual looked thoughtful. ‘People are being cooked. Animals too. And now the cosmic ray storm. The last surviving satellites, shielded by Earth’s shadow from the flash, told us that much. The high-energy particles will be knocking atmospheric molecules apart, oxygen, nitrogen, to produce nitrogen dioxide. Some of which will combine with rain to produce nitric acid, acid rain, while the rest lingers in the air to block out the sunlight which—’

  ‘It’s an extinction event,’ King breathed.

  ‘Indeed. As if a gamma-ray burster had gone off in the heart of the solar system.’

  ‘And the people?’

  ‘The flash will have the most immediate effect. The radiation will kick in soon; cancers will take most of the survivors of the short-term cull.’

  ‘Cull? What the hell kind of a word is that? And you, you bastards? You Core AIs?’

  ‘Oh, we will survive in our deep shelters. I certainly in my central bunker, with this store as a primary backup, and the partial I sent offworld with Penny Kalinski as a secondary.’

  ‘And then what?’

  Earthshine shrugged. ‘A new domain of life will eventually populate the Earth. Perhaps we will have some influence on the future. Not myself, of course. I have fled . . .’

  ‘I feel like hurting you.’

  ‘It’s not my fault. We tried to broker peace through the Council of Worlds. Yet I understand how you feel.’

  ‘Then whose fault is it? Ours, the Chinese?’

  ‘Maybe neither. Some reports have emerged about the beginnings of this, at Mars, at Ceres. Although I doubt if any historians will survive to piece together a full account. I am uploading what I can to my partial twins in the deep store and on the Tatania . . .’

  ‘Some bastard pulled the trigger, right? That’s what it boils down to. Without waiting the few minutes it would have taken to get confirmation from Earth. Christ. That was always the fear in the first Cold War, you know. That a commander of some nuclear sub, out of touch with his government, would take matters into his own hands.’

  ‘But even now the events that followed are uncertain. There have been fragmentary reports of mutinies on the Nail itself, by captive UN crew, and counter-mutinies by the Chinese, even as it fell towards Mercury. There may have been no control, in the end; as it came plummeting in for the strike the Nail was a war zone itself. There was nobody in a position to deflect it, even if the order had come to do so. How appropriate, that the end should come this way. A war nobody wanted, and thought would be kept at bay by sentimentality. A war triggered, not by any single command, but by foolishness, arrogance, and poor communication.’

  He spoke blandly, not judgementally, King thought; lacking processing power, lacking definition, he was smooth-faced, static, unconvincing.

  Suddenly King realised he was alone in here. Quite alone. Talking to nobody. He headed for the door. ‘Christ, I need a drink.’

  CHAPTER 88

  By the time the Nail struck Mercury the Tatania had already been travelling for three days. She had headed straight out from the Earth-moon system, away from the sun, and was more than three times as far from the sun as the Earth, when Beth picked up a fragmentary message from her mother.

  ‘I’m sorry I had to throw you at General Lex, even if he does owe me a favour. Wherever you end up I’ll come looking for you. Don’t forget that I’ll always—’

  And then, immediately after, the flash, dazzling bright, from the heart of the solar system. The bridge was flooded with light.

  Beth saw them react. Lex McGregor, in his captain’s chair, straightening his already erect back. Penny Kalinski grabbing Jiang’s hands in both her own. Earthshine, the creepy virtual persona, seeming to freeze. They all seemed to know what had happened, the significance of the flash.

  All save Beth.

  ‘What?’ Beth snapped. ‘What is it? What happened?’

  Earthshine turned his weird artificial face to her. In the years she’d spent in the solar system Beth had never got used to sharing her world with fake people. ‘They have unleashed the wolf of war. We, humanity, we had it bound up with treaties, with words. No more. And now, this.’

  ‘They being . . .’

  ‘The Hatch builders. Who else?’

  ‘And you, you aren’t human. You say we. You have no right to say that.’

  The virtual looked at her mournfully. ‘I was human once. My name was Robert Braemann.’

  And she stared at him, shocked to the
core by the name.

  Lex McGregor turned to face Penny. ‘So this is the kernels going up. Right, Kalinski?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘What must we do? We were far enough from the flash for it to have done us no immediate harm, I think. God bless inverse-square spreading. What comes next?’

  Penny seemed to think it over. ‘There’ll probably be a particle storm. Like high-energy cosmic rays. Concentrated little packets of energy, but moving slower than light. They’ll be here in a few hours. Hard to estimate.’

  ‘OK. Maybe I should cut the drive for a while, turn the ship around so we have the interstellar-medium shields between us and Mercury?’

  ‘Might be a good idea.’

  Beth didn’t understand any of this. ‘And what of Earth? What’s become of Earth?’

  Penny looked back at her. ‘Life will recover, ultimately. But for now . . .’

  Beth imagined a burned land, a black, lifeless ocean.

  McGregor began the procedure to shut down the main drive and turn the ship around. His voice was calm and competent as he worked through his checklists with his crew.

  CHAPTER 89

  2217

  On the day side of Per Ardua, the stars were invisible, save for Proxima itself, and the glorious twin primary suns of Alpha Centauri. But those who had followed Yuri and Liu and Stef in the exploration of the dark side, in the years following their pioneering trek, had rediscovered the night sky. A whole new generation had to be taught the constellations.

  A distance of four light years wasn’t much on the scale of the volume of space that contained the thousands of stars visible to the human eye; the sky of Per Ardua’s endless night was pretty much like that seen from Earth, and save for the brilliance of the nearby Alpha stars the constellations were mostly very similar. Just as on Earth, Cassiopeia was a particular favourite, its W-shape easy to pick out. But as seen from Per Ardua, there was the addition of one dim star to that constellation. That pendant to the W was Sol, the nearest star to Proxima save for the Alphas, a grain of light that had been the site of all human history before the first missions to Proxima. Parents pointed this out to their children.