Proxima (58 page)

‘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 from 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 . . .’

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

M
onitors 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.

O
fficer 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 . . .