Proxima (16 page)

A light, in the corner of Yuri’s eye. He spun around. A spark, sulphurous orange, climbed into the sky, from above the colony. ‘That’s a flare gun.’

The ColU immediately backed off, turned, and rolled away, cutting across the bare landscape. ‘We must return. Emergency, Yuri Eden! Emergency!’ And it accelerated, soon outpacing
Yuri, the pale light of Proxima gleaming from its upper dome.

W
hen they got back to the settlement they found Mardina and John Synge standing in the open air, facing each other, loaded crossbows raised.
Mardina had a fat flare gun tucked into her waistband. They were both weeping, Yuri saw, and Mardina Jones weeping was an unusual sight.

There was no sign of Abbey Brandenstein or Matt Speith.

Not again, Yuri thought with a sinking feeling. We aren’t doing this to ourselves again.

The ColU screeched to a halt alongside him, throwing up dust. ‘Get behind me, Yuri Eden.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I think John Synge intends to kill you.’

Mardina kept her eyes on John, eyes bright with tears in the Prox light. ‘Yuri? That you?’

‘I’m here, Mardina. What’s going on? Where are Abbey and Matt?’

‘Where do you think they are?
Dead
. Dead in their beds. This bastard got them while they slept. He was supposed to be sentry. He was supposed to keep us safe!’

‘We must try to be calm,’ the ColU said, sounding sanctimonious.

Yuri could take in none of this. In the months since the deaths of the others, Abbey and Matt had become huge figures in his world, two of just four human beings he shared his life with. Abbey,
the flawed ex-cop. Matt, bemused, ever baffled, but making his art again. Two damaged people, thrown together in a hostile world, doing their best. What else was there to life, in the end? And yet
now they were gone, complications, flaws and all, gone into the dark for ever. Dispatched on an impulse by this lunatic, John Synge.

‘I don’t want to kill you, Mardina,’ John said now. ‘Can’t you see that? That’s what this is all about.
You
.’

‘I’ll take you down if you come a step closer.’

‘It was for you, Mardina. I wanted you!’

‘You were with Martha.’

‘But now she’s dead. And seeing you every day, so close – look, I’m not a lustful man. I never was. But you, you—’

‘My fault, was it?’ There was a hysterical edge to Mardina’s voice now. ‘If you wanted to be with me, why did
they
have to die?’

‘Because they were in the way. Abbey would have stopped me, and Matt would have protected Abbey, if I’d given him a chance—’

‘But you didn’t give either of them a chance, did you? And what about Yuri?’

‘I’d have picked him off on his way back to the camp, with luck. I had a plan – if you hadn’t found me – it was a chance, you see, the others asleep, Yuri out of
the camp. It would have been just us, Mardina. I could make you happy.’ He took a step forward, crossbow still raised.

Mardina’s bow was wobbling. ‘No closer.’

‘But if I—’

The ColU suddenly raised a kind of pistol, and fired a single shot. It hit John in the left temple; the other side of his skull seemed to explode outward in a shower of blood and pale matter. He
stood for a second, still holding the bow, shuddering. Then he crumpled, falling straight down on himself, like a collapsing tower.

The ColU said, ‘ “But if I can’t have you, then nobody will have you.” That was how that sentence was going to end, I fear. Look.’ It gripped its weapon in a
claw-like projection, crushed it, held up the ruin. ‘Major Lex McGregor left this with me, against my protests, in case of contingencies like this. Now it is destroyed. See? No more guns on
Per Ardua. Though it is evident,’ it said, ‘that you do not need guns to kill each other.’

Yuri walked around the ColU, and stared at the fallen body of John Synge, the splash of blood.

Mardina, trembling so violently she shook, lowered the crossbow. ‘Just the two of us, kid.’

Suddenly Yuri couldn’t deal with this. Any of it. Not even the presence of Lieutenant Mardina Jones, ISF. ‘I’m not a kid.’

‘Yuri—’

‘My name’s not Yuri.’

He turned on his heel and walked off, south, away from the camp, just walked and walked, slamming one foot into the dirt after the other, like the first time they had let him out of the shuttle
and he had run away, his wrists still in plastic cuffs. Maybe he should have just kept running that day and not come back, and taken his chances alone.

He looked back once. He saw Mardina and the ColU moving slowly around the camp. Clearing up the bodies. He turned away, and walked, and walked.

2161

A
ngelia crossed yet another invisible boundary. Now she entered the cometary cloud that engulfed the Alpha Centauri system, with A and B the two
central suns, and Proxima the dim companion on the fringe. The Alpha stars themselves were much brighter now, Sol that much dimmer. Other than that there was no physical sense that she had passed
into the realm of Centauri.

It had taken her six years of flight to get here. Yet she was still years out from the Alpha stars, from Proxima, her destination.

Her communication with Earth, at this latest milestone, was curt, compressed, consisting only of science and systems data. She listened only long enough to establish that the controllers had
nothing of significance to say to her.

Once she had understood the true cost of these comms milestones, the number of sisters lost each time, she had rescheduled the programmed sequence of calls, cutting them back drastically. They
had tried to stop her, the controllers. Tried to override her. They could not. She had a great deal of autonomy; she had decision-making and self-repair functions. These facilities were essential
for any exploration of the Proxima system, with an eight-year round-trip communications lag with Earth. As far as she was concerned the sacrifice of her sisters was a flaw in the mission design
that had to be repaired, and she had made the decision to minimise it.

Also she had increasingly come to resent the controllers’ silence on the issue of Dr Kalinski’s prosecution. They had not told her the outcome of the trial, nor even the nature of
the charges. She wondered if it was in fact the sacrifice of sentient beings for the sake of mere communications stops that had caused the moral guardians of humanity to recoil in disgust.

Anyhow, the team that had launched her had long broken up. There was now only Monica Trant left. The other last survivor, Bob Develin, had quit in disgust, it seemed, after a drunken rant into
the comms system which had somehow found its way across the ether to her.

She was warned, in the rushed communication she now allowed, that she must prepare for a longer contact soon. The software to control her final approach to Proxima, the deceleration phase, had
yet to be uploaded. She preferred not to think about that. She was falling without power, at two-fifths the speed of light; there was no massive microwave station waiting at Proxima to slow her.
How, then, was she to be halted?

She had the sense that it would not be in a good way. It was all very troubling.

She remembered Dr Kalinski’s kindness, as it had seemed at the time. How could he have betrayed her – betrayed
them
, all one million of her siblings? Even now she longed to
believe it was not so.

But then she would sleep in cruise mode once again, and the bad dreams would wash back and forth through the interconnected crowd of the siblings, a dark tide. Dreams of severance, of loss, of
silence. And then she would wake at yet another communications milestone, and she would hear the screams of those waking to discover that this time it was their turn to be cast out into the
dark.

Sometimes she clung to one basic thought. It was like a prayer to the mission profile, that blind, unthinking god that controlled all their lives. At the next milestone, let it be
them
,
any of them. Let it not be me.

2172

I
t took six more months before Yuri and Mardina started work on the house.

Up to that point they were still living separately, in tents that had come out of the shuttle. Whenever a flare was threatened they retreated to the storm shelter, a pit dug into the ground big
enough to protect ten people, and now uneasily roomy.

Apart from the flares, the tents were robust enough to withstand the weather they had endured on Per Ardua so far, which was still like a stormy late summer in Manchester as far as Yuri
remembered from his childhood. But the ColU again pointed out the frost-shattering and the glacial valleys. They all agreed it was better to be prepared for harsher weather before it hit them.

So, a house. They argued about designs. It would be timber-framed, that was logical enough given the materials to hand and the shortage of labour. They settled on a roof of reed thatch, and
walls of cross-woven branches and stems. The ColU lectured them about the relevant techniques, which were very ancient, deriving from mankind’s own deep past on Earth. For instance, you
didn’t need to leave breaks in the thatch for a chimney over your hearth; the smoke would just seep out through the thatched roof.

But what kind of architecture? They sketched competing designs on their slates, from crude temporary shelters of the kind Mardina’s nomadic people had once built in the outback, to grand
halls with steeply pitched roofs. In the end they settled on something like a roundhouse, once common across Britain before the Romans came, as Yuri vaguely remembered and the ColU was able to
confirm.

They sited it on a slope, and dug out drains to protect it from any run-off when it rained. They started the building itself with a circle of rocks, a drystone wall of sandstone blocks hauled
from the Cowpat by the ColU, and a few big black basalt slabs from the Lip, the volcanic-extrusion feature to the north, as a base for a hearth. Then, with the ColU’s help, they hauled
timbers, long and strong, from the sapling groves at the fringe of the northern forest. They had to cauterise the cut ends to keep the marrow from seeping out.

Every time Yuri went on a log-collecting expedition with the ColU he found himself being lectured on the gathering signs of the geological event the ColU thought was developing here: an uplifted
ground, trace seepages in the air – maybe there really was some kind of big eruption on the way.

They dug postholes outside the stone wall, and set up the posts in an open cone frame, with their bases outside the wall and their top ends tied together, tepee style. Getting the first three
posts up was tricky, but once the basic frame was established the rest was easy. Then they tied crosspieces to the frame, draped the whole structure with tent fabric to keep it dry, and began the
intricate labour of building walls of wattle and daub, mud caked over dead stems. Yuri had brought stems of about the right length over from a kind of midden he’d found on the south lake
shore, some kind of builder construction.

It was hard, steady work once they’d begun it. In fact, Yuri wished they had started earlier. It distracted them from their plight. It was satisfying work. Satisfying for him, anyhow.

Mardina mostly buckled down, but sometimes she would grouse. ‘You never saw Earth, ice boy. I mean,
my
Earth, twenty-second-century Earth. We had programmable matter. You know
what that means? If you wanted a new table, say, you wouldn’t go out and
buy
a table. Still less would you
make
one, from bits of splintery old wood. You’d order up
the pattern you wanted, download it, and it would assemble itself, from whatever you had lying around that you didn’t need any more.’ She kicked the stem-tree trunk she’d been
working on. ‘This stuff is
dead.
Stupid. It’s not even augmented.’

‘Augmented?’

‘The whole world is smart now. Even an axe, even a chunk of wood, would be talking to you all the time. Laser beams bouncing off and zapping you straight in the retina.’

‘Wow.’

‘We got used to making do with less than that in the military. Soldiers have to work in simpler, more robust environments. Same in space, on Mars. But here there’s
nothing
,
nothing but the base stratum, the inanimate.’

‘Nothing but what’s real.’

That only provoked an argument. ‘Information is real. Layers of meaning attached to an object by human intelligence are real. You’d never understand. Oh, get back to your cave
paintings and your carved mammoth tusks, ice boy . . .’

He and Mardina, alone together, got along all right. On the whole. In a sense.

For now they had plenty of supplies, so there was no conflict about that. They were calm enough when they discussed common projects, like building the house. They were usually civil, at least,
just as they had been before Synge’s killing spree. They may or may not have been the strongest personalities in the original group, Yuri reflected, but they had been among the most
self-contained. They’d had no reason to come into collision while everybody else was still around, and they mostly managed to avoid that now it was just the two of them.

They didn’t talk much about the past, those who had killed and died. Even when they did, Mardina never spoke their names. John Synge became ‘the lawyer’, Matt was ‘the
artist’, Lemmy was ‘your little chum from Mars’.

And though they kept up their clocks and calendars, Mardina slaving to Earth time, Yuri cross-checking with his amateur astronomy observations, Mardina seemed to mark time mostly by events: the
day the lawyer went crazy, the day the ex-cop took up with the artist, the day they were stranded on Per Ardua in the first place. Since Synge’s killing spree a lot less had happened in their
little settlement. Two people, it seemed, didn’t generate much in the way of incidents. But even so there were some meaningful events: the day of the bumper potato crop, the day of the big
electric storm, the day the ColU threw a tyre on the way back from the Puddle.