Proxima (56 page)

Without warning the automated shuttle leapt from the ground. Penny felt acceleration press her hard into her couch. Beyond the windows the sky darkened quickly to a velvet blue-black, and as the
shuttle banked Penny glimpsed the Earth, a curved horizon against the black.

It took only minutes to reach orbit, and Penny felt a vast regretful relief to be off the planet at last. So far so good.

But here they stalled. It was going to take half a day for a translunar ferry ship to catch up with them, and even then it would be more chemical rocketry aboard the ferry that would take them
to the moon. Despite the urgency of the looming war, all of Earthshine’s influence, and all of Sir Michael King’s money, even now no kernel technology was allowed closer to Earth than
Penny’s own old lab on the far side of the moon. Penny Kalinski still couldn’t get from Earth to moon any faster than the standard three days.

Stranded in Earth orbit for these long hours, Penny watched the planet unravel below, the daylight side as bright as a Florida sky. From this perspective the Mighty Winter had made little
difference: a few more lights glowing in the heart of the old, largely abandoned low-latitude cities, and glaciers reforming in the mountains, splashes of white against the crumpled grey of the
rock. What she definitively didn’t see was any sign of war. No armies on the move, no cities burning, no missile sparks flying. And that was remarkable, when you reflected that China and the
nations it had co-opted into its Greater Economic Framework faced an enemy over just about every border. Even as the two blocs prepared to batter each other in the sky, the surface of the home
planet was left untouched.

‘For now, anyhow,’ Penny said when she discussed this with the others.

‘You sound cynical,’ Jiang Youwei said. ‘There is an agreement. It is a question of honour.’

‘Honour?’ Earthshine replied. ‘No. It is a question of madness. If war is insane, to fight a kind of partial war
with rules
is even more insane. To smash everything
up, if you are going to act at all – that ought to be your intention, or at least your threat. Otherwise there is no disincentive to fight; there is no overriding desire for peace.’

Penny grunted. ‘I follow your logic. But you’ve rarely sounded less human, Earthshine.’

At last their lunar ferry arrived, and they transferred. Like the Earth-to-orbit shuttle, there was no human pilot aboard – no crew at all save a solitary steward with paramedic training,
there to dish out prepacked meals, keep the lavatory clean, and deal with any heart attacks in transit. They left orbit, left Earth. But Penny looked back, all the way.

And on the second day of the flight, halfway to the moon, she saw fire at last: sparks flaring all around the equator of the Earth, but offset from the planet. She woke up Jiang, who was dozing.
The passengers, and the steward, pressed their faces to the small windows, trying to see.

‘Orbital assets being taken out,’ Jiang guessed. ‘The Chinese are attacking UN stations in space, and presumably vice versa.’

‘But there are no missile trails. They aren’t being attacked from the ground, by either side.’

‘No. From orbit only. Nothing to connect the war in the sky to the protected Earth. And – oh, look!’

It was a Chinese junk, its filmy sail casting a pale shadow across the face of the Earth, clearly visible even from a couple of hundred thousand kilometres out.

‘So it begins,’ was Earthshine’s only comment.

On the third day the news got worse. The real fighting had started.

It had begun on Mars. Nobody seemed sure precisely what had been the final trigger – there were scattered reports of a remote Chinese base, intended for the nuclear mining of aquifer
water, being destroyed by one of its own weapons. An act of UN sabotage maybe – well, that seemed to be the working assumption. In response Chinese troops had marched into the UN’s
Martian enclaves, like Eden, more or less unopposed. Mars was now China’s, overall, but UN guerrilla forces out on the rusty plains had already mounted retaliatory strikes against Chinese
emplacements. Mars was a big planet on a human scale, and empty; it would be a slow-burning battleground. However, just as Earth as a whole would be preserved, both sides had agreed to leave
Mars’s greatest monument, Obelisk, untouched. Earthshine shook his head at this fresh gesture of foolish sentimentality.

Then they heard that some of the Chinese junks, having looped around the Earth, were heading for the moon. Another countdown clock started ticking in Penny’s head. Could Earthshine’s
party land on the moon, board the waiting interplanetary hulk craft, get away, all before the Chinese struck?

On the fourth day, as the ferry prepared for its landing on the moon, news came of a fresh development: an attempted UN assault on Ceres, with hulk ships that had been stationed there, under
stealth cover, for months. But the situation was complex. It turned out that the ships had already been heavily infiltrated by Chinese agents. When the attack on the asteroid began, some of the UN
ships had turned on their fellows, disabling them, in one case destroying. And then the Chinese at Ceres, having taken control of the surviving hulks, evidently following a preplanned design, began
using the remaining vessels to build – something.

Penny followed the news as best she could, a fog of partial reports, silences, and probably downright lies, whose opacity only increased her gathering sense of dread.

T
he landing on the moon was astonishing.

The passengers were told nothing about what was to come, not before the craft entered its approach orbit and came dipping down towards the satellite’s crumpled landscape, under a jet-black
sky. Through the thick round window beside her seat Penny watched crater-rim mountains reach up like claws.

She grabbed Jiang’s hand; she couldn’t help it. ‘We’re going hellish low.’

He shrugged. ‘There is no reason why not. No atmosphere on the moon, remember. You can dip an orbit as low as you like—’

The craft passed through another mountain shadow.

‘—as long as you don’t hit anything in the process.’

‘
As long as?
Youwei, we’re lower than the mountains, and still at interplanetary velocities.’

Earthshine grinned. ‘This is what you get when you hand over control of your life to an AI. I mean to the automated pilot of this craft, not a relatively empathetic, quasi-human individual
such as myself. The sky is full of Chinese warships, remember, which are closing in on the moon. The craft has undoubtedly been given the overriding instruction to bring us down as quickly as
possible, and that is what it is doing. This is an exercise in orbital geometry, not reassurance.’

‘So how is it planning to land us?’

‘We will soon find out . . .’

The attitude thrusters banged. The craft lurched, down and sideways, throwing the passengers around in their couches. Jiang squeezed Penny’s hand harder. She glimpsed the landscape of the
moon fleeing past her window, crater rims, a sharp, close-by horizon. Then it was as if something grabbed at the shuttle – silently, smoothly, with no crude mechanical coupling, but the craft
was held firm. And the deceleration was sudden, fierce, face forward, so she was thrust into her harness. Still there was barely any noise, only the high-pitched whine of fans, the
passengers’ ragged breathing. The deceleration, the pressure of the harness on her chest, went on and on.

‘The sling,’ Jiang said now, through a grimace of discomfort.

‘The what?’

‘A mass driver. A launch rail, wrapped around the curve of this world, like Ceres. We have come skimming down from our transfer orbit to touch it, almost. It has grabbed us with its
magnetic field. The sling is slowing us down, the reverse of the way it is generally used to hurl payloads from a standing start off into space.’

‘A hell of a way to land a crewed spacecraft.’

Jiang shrugged. ‘It is not routinely used, but there have been piloted trials to test the technique. It is only a question of orbital geometry.’

‘To an AI, maybe.’

‘The only reason it is not used more often is because it defies human instinct.’

‘I’ll say. If anything went wrong—’

‘It would not, it could not—’

‘Stop arguing,’ Earthshine said now. The shuttle was sliding to rest, the deceleration easing. ‘It doesn’t matter any more. We’re down. Now we have to face what
comes next.’ He pointed out of a port.

Penny looked, and saw a hulk, a kernel-drive craft, a tall, fat cylinder standing on squat legs on the lunar surface. The craft stood on a smooth, hardened apron, a rough disc with ragged edges.
Fuel pipes trailed up to sockets on the body of the ship, and fat-wheeled supply trucks rolled by. The sun was low, off to the left – she had no idea if it was lunar morning or evening in
this place – and the rocket cast a long shadow. It was like some pre-Apollo dream of space flight, a crude rocketship.

The ferry at last slid to a halt. Penny heard mechanical clamps clatter closed, to pin the hull safely in place on the sling rail.

The passengers immediately began to unbuckle. A bus raced across the lunar surface towards them, throwing up rooster tails of dust. Penny stood up, her head swimming in the low lunar gravity.
There was no time to think. Earthshine was right. She just had to put the scary trauma of the landing out of her head, and face whatever came next.

Earthshine flickered, looked up at Penny with a wistful smile, then imploded in a shower of evanescent, evaporating pixels. Shut down for the transfer, she guessed.

There was a bang on the hull, and the hatch slid open, to reveal a short tunnel to the bus. An ISF officer, a young woman, stood in the door. ‘Come. Please.’ Once they were aboard
the bus, the ISF woman urged them to sit down and strap in.

The bus detached quickly and rolled away across the lunar surface, making some speed. The bus was insubstantial, little more than a blister of some transparent substance over a low cart with a
couple of rows of seats, and when its wheels hit one of the shallow craters that littered the lunar ground, it floated up off the surface like a toy. Grimly Penny clung to a rail on the back of the
seat in front of her. She wondered if this fragile little vehicle was meant for taking tourists around Tranquillity or one of the other museum sites.

But they were making fast progress, heading straight for the base of that kernel-powered rocketship. Penny saw a truck offloading white cargo boxes in protective pallets for transfer to the
ship, the essence of Earthshine being transferred to his interplanetary chariot, perhaps. The whole operation had a scary air of improvisation.

‘I don’t recognise this place,’ she said to Jiang. ‘And I thought I knew the moon. I worked here long enough.’

‘All of this has been assembled quickly, and largely in secret. Even the kernel ship’s landing pad.’ He grinned at her. ‘Can you guess how the pad was made?’

She looked again at the disc of ground on which the ship stood. ‘It looks like a sheet of basalt . . . oh.’

‘Yes.
The ship made it itself.
I have seen images of it; General McGregor, who is our pilot, had the ship hover over the lunar ground.’

McGregor? That name was familiar. ‘And the downwash of the kernel-physics jets melted the dust.’

‘That’s the idea. We live in a remarkable time, Penny, when such stunts are possible. Adventure-story stuff.’

She was less impressed; the whole thing struck her as showing off.

She was distracted by a ripple of light in the sky. A Chinese junk, it had to be. Once in space the hulk ship would be able to outpace any such craft, but it was vulnerable while on the ground;
a rock thrown down at interplanetary speeds would split that squat hull like an eggshell. ‘We might only have minutes,’ she murmured.

‘I know,’ Jiang said. ‘Everything is under control.’

She thought he deserved a sceptical glance for that.

The bus skidded sideways and fairly threw itself at a docking port in the base of the hull, meeting it with millimetre-scale precision. More scary unhesitating AI
navigation.

Beyond the port was a small chamber, brightly lit, with what looked like a door to an elevator shaft beyond. Within, two people were waiting for them, a male ISF officer, and a civilian woman
– and to her surprise Penny recognised them both.

The woman, in her late thirties, slim, dark, lost-looking, was Beth Eden Jones: a human native of a different star system, returned to Sol by a trick of alien technology. One of the most famous
faces in the solar system, probably, unmistakable with that barbaric tattoo, and staring back at Penny. Beth snapped, ‘What? I just got here too. What are you staring at?’

Penny flinched. ‘Sorry. It’s just – I know you. I’m Colonel Penelope Kalinski, ISF.’ She held out a hand, which wasn’t taken. ‘You met my sister on
Mercury when—’

‘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.