Proxima by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online

forgotten you were in a starship, for long periods. Now here was the reality of the situation suddenly intruding. His latest prison really was a battered tin
can light years from Earth.
    And then, not five seconds after the acceleration cut out, the riot started.
    It erupted all at once, along the length of the hull. The yelling was the first thing Yuri noticed, shouted commands, whoops, screams of defiance and fear.
    The big fluorescent light fittings were put out immediately. The crimson emergency lighting system soon came on, shining from behind toughened glass, but the hull was plunged into a flickering,
shadowy half-light. And people moved through the shadows, grabbing handrails and slamming at the partition flooring with booted feet, so that broken panels started hailing down through the crowded
air. Others used whatever tools they had to hand, spanners, broom handles, they even wrenched rails off the wall, to smash up equipment.
    The Peacekeepers were an early target too. Near Yuri, from nowhere, three, four, five people, men and women, came hurtling out of the air like missiles and slammed straight into Mattock.
Struggling, his head surrounded by a mist of vomit and blood, the Peacekeeper had no chance of reaching his weapons. He looked to Yuri, who was clinging to the wall. ‘Help me, you
bastard—’ A booted foot slammed into his mouth, silencing him.
    Yuri turned away. He pulled himself around the walls, working his way across rails and equipment banks, trying to keep out of trouble, trying not to be noticed. He had a rendezvous of his own to
make.
    As he moved he observed that the hull’s population was split. Maybe a third of them were working in a coordinated way, savaging the Peacekeepers and, he saw, one or two astronaut crew
members they’d got hold of, or systematically wrecking the internal equipment. Obviously they’d planned this, coordinated it for the onset of zero gravity. Most of the rest, scared,
nauseous, were swarming around trying to keep out of the way of the violence. They were almost all adults, of course; the few kids, two- or three-year-olds born during the voyage, clung to their
mothers in terror.
    And up at the top of the hull Yuri saw a party gathering around the central fireman’s pole, preparing to climb up to the hull’s apex, up to the bridge. A woman he recognised, called
Delga, was at their head. That was no surprise. He’d known her on Mars, where they’d called her the snow queen of Eden. On the ship she had quickly built a power base in the early days
when, without alcohol, drugs, tobacco, the whole hulk had been like a huge rehab facility as everybody worked through cold turkey of one kind or another – and Delga, who somehow got her hands
on various narcotics, had acquired a lot of customers. Yuri had kept out of her way on Mars, and on the ship, and he did so now. He dropped his head and concentrated on his own progress.
    He got to his meeting point. It was just a kind of alcove on a central deck, a warren of thick pipes and ducts and power cables between two hefty air-scrubbing boxes. But it was tucked out of
the way of trouble. He and his buddies hadn’t anticipated this scenario exactly, but they’d made contingency plans to meet here, in case.
    And now, here he found Lemmy, and Anna Vigil, and Cole, nearly four years old, a timid little boy who clung to his mother’s legs, all waiting for him.
    Wordlessly Yuri backed into the space, opened a maintenance panel on one of the scrubber boxes, took out a wrench and a screwdriver, and thus armed wedged himself in position before the others.
After three and a half years he had a reputation on this hull. A loner he might be but he’d fight back, and was best left alone if there were easier targets. This had been the plan
they’d cooked up, the three of them, when they’d thought ahead to bad times; this was the best Yuri could think of to protect them.
    He heard a scream. In the shadowy chaos, he saw