Proxima by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page A

that three men had got hold of a woman. Yuri knew them all; he’d thought one of the men at least was a friend of the woman, who’d
paired off with another guy. Yuri knew the woman too; called Abbey Brandenstein, she was an ex-cop and she could look after herself, but she was being overwhelmed. Now they were dragging her into a
corner, though she was still fighting back. As the screaming got worse Anna Vigil covered little Cole’s eyes and ears, and hugged him close.
    The noise was still ferocious, a clamour of yells and screams. More alarm sirens were sounding off, adding to the racket. There was no sign yet of the Peacekeepers taking any kind of coordinated
action. Yuri saw Gustave Klein on the other side of the hull, flanked by a couple of his heavies, watching the action with a grin on his face. Maybe it was Klein who was really in control.
    Lemmy peered cautiously up into the apex of the hull. ‘Delga’s reached the bridge, it looks like.’
    ‘What do you think they want?’
    Lemmy shrugged. ‘To take the ship. Force the astronauts to whiz us all back to Earth. I bet there’s a similar breakout going on in the other hull; they’ll have timed it. I
guess it’s the last chance we’ll get. There’ll be no hope once we’re on the ground, on a planet of Proxima.’
    ‘But they could smash up the ship before they win that argument.’
    ‘True.’
    ‘You think it’s going to work?’
    Lemmy grinned. ‘Nah. Look.’ He pointed to the far wall of the hull.
    An airlock hatch opened and a dozen astronauts tumbled out of the lock and into the hull’s cluttered spaces. They wore hard, carapace-like pressure suits of brilliant white, marked with
arm stripes in gaudy recognition colours, red, blue, green. They had their helmets sealed, their faces hidden behind golden visors, and their movements were jerky, too rapid, over-definite –
a product of military-class enhancements, Yuri had learned, exoskeletons, drugs, boosters from the cellular level up. They carried weapons of some kind, not guns, not in a pressure hull, but what
might be tasers, even whips.
    Some of the rebelling inmates went for them immediately. The astronauts fought back with clean, hard moves, and snaps of their tasers, rasps of the whips. They were like insects with their
superfast movements and hard outer shells, like space-monster cockroaches in this chaotic human environment. Before them the inmates looked grubby and unevolved. People fell back howling, blood
spraying into the air.
    Meanwhile one group of astronauts, three, four of them, broke away and made for a big locked control panel a couple of decks higher up towards the bridge. More rebels tried to get in their way,
but the astronauts were too fast, too definite, and their opponents were brushed aside. The astronauts unlocked the panel with brisk taps of gloved fingers, and plugged pull-out leads into sockets
in their suits, perhaps for identity verification.
    Then, not a minute after the airlock had first opened, a yellowish gas began to vent from outlets all around the hull, and people began coughing, panicking.
    Lemmy grinned. ‘Sweet dreams. See you on Prox c . . .’
    But Yuri was already falling away down a long dark tunnel, and could hear no more.

 
     
     
     
CHAPTER 8
     
     
     
     
    T he ship’s population – what survived of it after the riots – was split up into small groups, held in isolated chambers in a
newly partitioned hull.
    On being woken from his latest bout of unconsciousness, Yuri found himself cuffed with plastic strips to a metal-frame chair, itself locked to a mesh floor. He was in a small partition-walled
cabin with ten others, four women, six men. They were all dressed identically, in orange jumpsuits, with no boots, just socks. This was his assigned ‘drop group’, he was told. The only
one in here that Yuri knew well was Lemmy. He did soon learn that the passengers had already been assigned to these drop groups, nominally fourteen