Proxima (38 page)

‘Look,’ Beth called, pointing. ‘You can see the tracks we made before.’ A half-dozen sets of human footprints, one of them barefoot, Yuri saw, snaking off to the
south.

Mardina grunted. ‘And beside them, this.’ She pointed to a set of tyre tracks, more footprints of booted feet, another set of tracks heading back to the jungle. ‘They saw you,
Beth. They came out for a look.’ She glanced up at the jungle. ‘They know we’re on the way.’

Liu shrugged. ‘They probably always did. What’s the point of them being here at all if not to watch us?’ He glanced up at the sky. ‘We Chinese have plenty of stealth sats
in orbit around Earth, and Mars, that no UN body has ever spotted. Probably the other way round too.’ He waved into the air. ‘Hi, Major McGregor!’

They walked on, Mardina leading the way south, along the river valley. She said, ‘But they haven’t done anything about it. Maybe they
can’t
do anything. They’ve
been here twenty-plus years already. Shit breaks down.’

‘Or they don’t know what to do about us,’ Yuri said. ‘I mean, we aren’t supposed to
be
here, are we?’

‘True,’ said the ColU. ‘Each dropped group was programmed to be sedentary. And besides, the belt of heat and aridity around this Hub should have excluded foot
travellers.’

Yuri said mildly, ‘But nobody at the ISF seems to have “programmed” a migrating lake. Or a star winter.’

‘Or human nature,’ Liu said with a grin. ‘And here we are.’

They had to climb up a rock face, past the pretty impressive waterfall Beth had told Yuri about.

Then, after a couple of hours, they reached the rough boundary of the central forest. As Beth had described, the trees were not like those of the great canopy forests of the higher latitudes;
these were shorter, with stout, squat trunks, and multiple leaves sprouting from stubby branches. But their trunks were just the usual scaled-up stems, the short branches and small leaves no doubt
local adaptations to the turbulent substellar weather.

Mardina called a halt before they took on the forest interior. There was a pond nearby, thick with stems, and the builders skittered off that way.

They parked the truck and the ColU well away from the forest and its unknown dangers, and set up camp for the night. They built a fire for washing water and to boil up tea, and prepared to take
turns to stand watch, under the unchanging grey sky.

Yuri found it difficult to sleep, under a quickly erected tepee. It wasn’t like in the permanent camps, there were no little kids running around, nobody getting drunk on Klein vodka. But
Peacekeeper Mattock did snore like his throat had been slit. And one of the mutilated ColUs gave off an endless low hum of small sounds, a whir of pumps, a hiss of hydraulics, the occasional cough
of some small engine. Yuri’s ColU blamed its lobotomy; its ‘subconscious’, the semi-autonomic systems that ran the truck’s infrastructure, were full of small malfunctions as
a result. Beth suggested the truck was having bad dreams. The ColU said that was more true than not.

In the camp morning they packed up and got ready to push on into the alien jungle. Beth, who’d been up early and had done some scouting, thought she had found a path.

The ColU, deploying its sensor arm, confirmed it. ‘Vehicles have travelled this way, leaving characteristic traces – even faint radioactivity in places – though an attempt has
been made to cover up the tracks. Nevertheless, a way exists.’ It plugged its fibre-optic cable into the dumb truck, said, ‘All aboard,’ and set off without hesitation into the
jungle, leading its passive partner.

Yuri, Mardina and Beth clambered aboard the ColU as it rolled off. Mattock, Delga and Liu took the truck. The builders, without apparent concern, followed in their wake, but they kept away from
the human-made track, preferring to work their own way through the thicker undergrowth.

As soon as they got into the shade of the trees Yuri was immediately hit by the increased heat, the humidity; it was like entering some huge mouth, and he was glad he wasn’t walking. Yuri
heard Mattock wheezing as he gulped down water.

The light had an oddly liquid quality, as if they pushed through some murky pond, stained with Per Ardua’s sombre green. The canopy here was low, not the virtually solid roof of the
high-latitude forest; the smaller leaves let plenty of light get through to the ground level, where a healthy undergrowth sprouted. When a wind blew up – bringing the travellers no relief,
the moving air itself was hot and moist – the stubby branches of the trees shook and rattled. Insects, or insect-analogues, fluttered around, the size of butterflies but built from sticklike
stems and bits of filmy webbing. They landed on the skin of the people, only to lurch away again apparently disappointed, but they kept coming back for another try. Yuri suspected they would be a
plague until they got out of the jungle.

And they started to see animal life, some of it built on an impressive scale: hefty-looking kites in the trees’ upper branches, smaller than those of the high-latitude forests but more
powerful-looking to Yuri’s eye, and smaller, even stronger-looking flightless versions that scuttled across the forest floor. One big beast with flight-vanes like samurai blades sat and
watched them go by, with multiple upright eye-leaves.

Beth was holding a crossbow, loaded. ‘I do
not
like the look of that.’

‘I think we must expect vigorous variants of life here,’ the ColU said as it rolled forward. ‘More energy is available from Proxima here than anywhere else on the planet.
Rather like the forests that once swathed Earth’s tropics, there is plenty of opportunity for life here, for speciation. Perhaps, for example, the kites first evolved here. Some may have
migrated to the high-latitude forests and adapted. Others might have settled on the lakes and marshes. Yet others might have stayed here and given rise to the flightless predatory forms we have
glimpsed.’

‘Just so long as they don’t try predating on me,’ Beth murmured.

Rain fell.

Just like that. There was no sense of a start or a finish to the storm; it just descended, all at once, sheets of water piling down vertically between the trees, or dripping from foliage that
seemed to be of no use in shielding the party.

They were all soaked immediately. And when the water started running over the ground, the vehicles had to slither to a stop. They found what shelter they could, under the trees, huddled against
the ColU. Beth put her arm around Mardina. Yuri held up his face to the rain, hoping for some relief from the heat, but the water itself was warm, and faintly briny when it worked into his mouth,
perhaps evaporated from some salty inland sea.

There was a tremendous crack of thunder, a flash of lightning that seemed to light up the whole forest.

Then the rain stopped, as suddenly as it had started. Still, however, the water dripped from the trees in a shower on their backs and heads. The light got a bit brighter, but there was no direct
sunlight, no break in the cloud layer.

And Mattock was groaning.

Yuri looked back. The Peacekeeper, with his soaked uniform open to the waist, was doubled over in the mud, gasping, like he was drowning. Liu and Delga were trying to grab hold of him, to get
him on his back.

Mardina slapped the hull of the ColU. ‘He’s sick. Do your stuff.’

The ColU lumbered around, sending up a spray of watery mud and leaf matter, and rolled back. With a combined effort of all five of them – ‘One, two,
three
!’ –
they lifted Mattock off the ground and onto the ColU’s carapace. They laid him out, tucking spare clothing under his head, while the ColU’s fine manipulator arms took his pulse, checked
his airways, took his temperature with a fine probe in the mouth. Then an equipment bay in the ColU’s flank opened up and a drip feed snaked into his upper arm.

Liu asked, ‘So what’s wrong with him, autodoc?’

‘The heat,’ Delga snarled. ‘What do you think?’

‘That’s true,’ the ColU said. ‘I believe he may have had a mild heart attack. He needs proper treatment – his temperature needs to be reduced
quickly—’

Yuri said, ‘But we’re stuck here. The ground is a pond after that storm. If we try to move, even if we back out of here, we’ll end up smashing into a tree.’

Beth watched all this. ‘We need help, then,’ she said. She walked a few paces into the forest, the mud splashing her bare legs. ‘The game’s over!’ she shouted. Her
voice echoed in the forest, and somewhere there was a bird-like fluttering as a startled kite flew away. ‘You blokes in the IFS!’

‘ISF,’ her mother murmured gently.

‘Whatever. We know you’re watching us. Well, you can see how we’re fixed. Mr Mattock is going to die unless you help him. So come on. No more of these stupid games you people
play. Come on out, ready or not. Why, he even put on his nice blue uniform just for you—’

And there was a crash of foliage, lights that glared bright. A truck – no, a kind of armoured car, Yuri thought, like a beefed-up Mars rover – came barrelling out of the heart of the
jungle. It was basically a camouflage drab green, but it had mud-splashed logos, of the UN, the ISF, even the name of the
Ad Astra
carefully lettered on its side. And Yuri saw goggled eyes
peering at him from out of a slit window.

T
he rover skidded to a halt, just feet away from the ColU, sending up a mud spray. Beth flinched back, hiding behind Yuri. He reflected that,
Ardua-born, she’d never seen a vehicle travel so fast.

‘ISF,’ said the ColU.

‘ISF,’ said Yuri.

‘Told you so,’ said Mardina.

The ColU said, ‘I have misled you. After all this time . . . but not intentionally. I did not know they were here.’

‘They lied to you, just as much as to us,’ said Yuri.

The ColU went ominously silent.

‘Later, ColU,’ Mardina said. ‘Don’t go crashing on us now.’

A heavy door opened with a hiss of hydraulics. The man that emerged looked overdressed to Yuri, given the heat, in a heavy coat and trousers in the drab green shades of Per Ardua, and he carried
another thick jacket. He had a weapon at his waist, Yuri saw, a vicious-looking handgun, clearly visible. He faced the group, who stood around the suffering Mattock on the ColU. He looked seventy,
at least. Under a blue Peacekeeper’s beret, greying hair was plastered down by sweat.

Yuri knew who this was. ‘Peacekeeper Tollemache,’ he said, wondering. Decades older, heavier, but undoubtedly him. ‘I thought I’d enjoyed your company enough on the
ship.’

Tollemache sneered. ‘Shame you still haven’t got the bruises I gave you, you little shit. I can’t say I’m glad to see you again. Or any of you losers. Good Christ, look
at you, you’re a pack of scarecrows.’

Delga laughed at him. ‘Remember me, Tollemache? You owe me money.’

‘Fuck off. Which of you bastards is the sick bastard?’

Mardina glared. ‘Which do you think?’

Tollemache stomped over to the ColU, glanced over Mattock, and placed his spare coat over him. ‘Get that drip out of his arm. We’ll get him into the truck and back to the
base.’

They got organised. There was a stretcher in the rover, quickly unfolded, and under Tollemache’s brusque directions they prepared to lift Mattock into the rover’s interior. The
migrants had to do it themselves; Tollemache stood by, and nobody else came out of the rover to give a hand.

The rover’s interior was brightly lit and smelled of disinfectant. Yuri could see there was a driver in a sealed cabin upfront, beyond a thick window. Beth looked around the vehicle in
wide-eyed wonderment. Mardina’s look was more complex. Resentful, perhaps. Anger building. Struggling with the Peacekeeper’s heavy body in this clean technological space, Yuri felt
grimy, out of place.

‘I don’t get putting a coat on top of him,’ Liu admitted. ‘Won’t that just make him hotter?’

‘I’ve seen this design before,’ Mardina said. ‘Tollemache’s wearing the same. There’s frozen ice in there, inside insulated layers.’

‘And built-in cryo circuits,’ Tollemache said. ‘They left us ready for the heat here. They gave us the right kind of diet to cope, extra vitamin C, low calories, low protein,
high carbs . . . They monitor us, I mean the autodocs, they take our temperatures all the time.’

‘With a probe up your ass,’ Delga said. ‘I do hope they stuck a probe permanently up your ass.’

Tollemache ignored her. ‘Anyway it’s been easy since this star winter, as you call it, cut in. Not like before.’

Yuri said, ‘ “As we call it.” You hear everything we say, do you?’

‘The AIs listen in, and filter. Don’t flatter yourself, shithead. You’re not that important.’

‘I knew it,’ Mardina said, her voice thickening with anger. ‘I knew it, all these years. I
told
you, Yuri.’

‘Yeah. But they never came out of their box to help you, did they?’

Tollemache pointed. ‘Get him strapped down on that couch. There won’t be room for you all to ride. Two of you, with him. The rest will walk with me. If you can keep up.’

Mardina and Beth got into the back of the rover. The door flaps closed up seamlessly, and the rover rolled back, did a brisk turn, and pushed away into the forest.

Tollemache faced them, Yuri, Delga, Liu. He pointed the way the rover had gone. ‘Follow the rover. I’ll follow you. I don’t trust any of you.’

Delga just laughed at him. She walked away with Liu.

Yuri said, ‘Our ColU—’

‘It can follow us. And the one you wrecked.’

‘It wasn’t us – ah, the hell with it.’

As they walked, Yuri was soon immersed once more in enclosing, withering heat, and he hoped it really wasn’t far to this base of Tollemache’s. Tollemache himself walked boldly
enough, but Yuri wondered how much good his ice-laden suit and all the rest actually did him.

There was a clattering noise behind them. Tollemache whirled, drawing his gun. ‘Fucking woodies.’

‘What? You mean builders. We call them builders.’