Chapter 21
When 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.
Chapter 22
2161
Angelia 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.