Thorne snorted. “What do you mean by that?”
McGregor said sternly, “You must have children. You must raise them, you must have them farming for you, supporting you. Otherwise you will grow old, and you will die, one by one, you will starve to death in this place. There are other things you need to have done by then. To have established a forge, for instance, to be producing your own steel—the ColU can help you with that. But above all, you must have children, or you will not survive yourselves.”
John Synge said, “And what about the rights of those children? Who are you to condemn them, and their children, to lives of servitude on this dismal world—all to serve your ludicrous, Heroic Generation-type scheme of galactic dominance?”
Martha Pearson stood now. Yuri knew she came from old money on Hawaii; in her late thirties, she was tough, self-contained. “And what right do you have to condemn me and the other women here to lives as baby machines?”
Onizuka stood too. The Peacekeepers began to look more uneasy. Onizuka said, “There’s a more basic problem. Whatever your plan was, you’ve left us with six men and four women. Who’s going to get who? Which men will be without a woman? Will you decide this before you fly back up to the sky?”
McGregor responded by turning, almost gracefully, to a startled Mardina Jones. Without warning he’d taken her pistol from its holster. “Actually there will be five women. I’m sorry, my dear.”
Mardina, still reflexively recording the whole exchange on her shoulder unit, looked startled. “What the hell are you doing, Lex?”
“You’re staying. Look, we had a conference about it, the other senior crew and I, under the Captain.”
“A conference?”
“Obviously we couldn’t consult with New New York, given the lightspeed lag. But we do have standing orders. Policies. If the numbers of the colonists fall due to wastage, and they have done, we are expected to make up the numbers by impressing members of the crew. This particular group needs more women. And, genetically speaking, you come from a group that is as remote from the rest as any on Earth—”
“I’m an Aboriginal woman,” she said, almost softly. “That’s why you’re doing this. Lex, have you any idea how I had to fight to build my career from a background like that, to get on that damn ship? And now, after all that, you’re going to dispose of me here, all because of what I am. An Aborigine, a woman.”
“I’m sure with your practical skills, your training, you’ll be a fine addition to this pioneering group…”
Yuri saw John Synge, Harry Thorne, Onizuka exchanging glances. The Peacekeepers tensed. Yuri, sensing trouble coming, stood himself, grabbed Lemmy’s arm and pulled him behind his back.
“Let’s get them,” Onizuka said, quite calmly. “Let’s get off this fucking dump.” And he picked up a rock and charged.
Of course they had no chance. The charging men were felled in the first salvo of anaesthetic darts. McGregor himself took out Mardina immediately; she dropped to the ground in her smart astronaut uniform. Matt Speith ran away. Abbey Brandenstein, cuffed, in the dirt, just laughed.
Then it looked as if Mattock was going to go for the women. When he raised a riot stick to Pearl Hanks, Lemmy yelled, “No!”, pulled away from Yuri, and ran forward.
And Yuri followed.
The two Peacekeepers seemed to have been waiting for him to give them an excuse. They charged straight at Yuri.
Mattock was on him first, slamming him to the ground with a punch to the throat before Yuri had the chance to raise an arm to defend himself. “You’re the future of mankind, you little shit,” Mattock snarled. And he kicked Yuri in the head.
The ColU, administering simple medicine to the injured members of the group, brought Yuri round before the shuttle took off.
Then Yuri sat with Lemmy and the others, including Mardina Jones, silent, clearly furious. They watched as the bird screamed back down the trail it had laid down across the dry lake bed and lifted effortlessly into the air.
And then, as the undercarriage raised, something fell out of the port wing. It tumbled like a rag, buffeted by the shuttle’s slipstream, before falling to the ground and lying limp.
Lemmy got up and looked hastily around the group, counting heads. “Who’s missing? Jenny. That was Jenny Amsler, stowing away in the wing. Stupid bitch.”
“And then there were ten.” Lemmy laughed, nervous, but nobody joined in.
The shuttle turned its nose upwards and screamed up into the static light show that was the sky of Proxima c.
Chapter 14
2155
“This is Angelia 5941. This voice message, which is expressed in non-technical language and contains personal comments as well as summaries of scientific and technological achievements, is intended for public release, and accompanies a more technical download.
“Good morning, to Dr Kalinski, and to Bob and Monica and all my ground crew, and of course to Stef, my half-sister. I have calculated it will be dome-morning in the operations room in Yeats when this message reaches you, in nearly six days’ time.
“Sixteen days after launch I am in an excellent state of health, and all subsystems are operating nominally.
“I have now completed my cruise through the outer reaches of the solar system. Strictly speaking I entered interstellar space about a day after the microwave beam cut-off at the end of acceleration. At that point I passed through the heliopause, the boundary where the thin wind that blows between the stars dominates over the weakening stream from the sun. But since then I have passed through many interesting domains: the radius of the sun’s gravitational focus, where light from distant stars collects, after ten days, and I emerged from the Kuiper belt of Pluto-like ice worlds some days after that. But I am still in the sun’s realm, for I am now passing through the mighty Oort cloud, a sphere of comets around the solar system which it will take me years to cross.
“At this point my configuration changes. In the spaces between the stars there are dust and ice grains—this is known as the interstellar medium—it is sparse, but if I were hit by even a single grain significant damage could be done. Dexter Cole’s craft carried generators to power a mighty magnetic field and laser bank which shattered, electrically charged, and deflected any threatening grains. I, with much less power than was available to Cole, have a more passive defensive strategy.
“I am designed to take up a new form. Actually I am made of programmable matter—essentially a form of smart carbon—and I can take any shape I like. I walked on Mercury in the form of a young woman. Here, on the edge of the Kuiper belt, I am like a tremendous radio-telescope dish. Now I will change again. I will fold down to a needle shape, with a one-square-centimetre cross section and a length of no less than a kilometre, and a density about that of water. I will be like a javelin, spearing straight at Proxima Centauri. And I myself, Angelia 5941, will be like a droplet of water lost in the bulk of that javelin. With such a small cross section, you see, the chances of my being damaged by a grain of dust are much reduced. Of course while I am in this ‘cruise mode’, without an antenna, I will not be able to communicate with Dr Kalinski.
“I should say why I identify myself as Angelia 5941.
“I am not one Angelia, but a million. Each of us is a sheet only a few tens or hundreds of atomic diameters thick—each of us virtually a single carbon molecule in the form of a hundred-metre disc. We were born in a facility at an Earth-moon Lagrange point, a point of gravitational stability in space, a place of dark and cold and quiet; we were peeled, one by one, from a tremendous mould, given our own identities, and then united.