Proxima 01 - Proxima by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter [Baxter, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Orion Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 44

Having met, they had to decide to go one way or the other. Yuri chose to walk west with Delga, towards her group, which she called ‘the mothers’, rather than back towards Mardina.

‘Only a few klicks,’ she said.

‘Yeah. We’re further away than that.’ That was a lie; in fact Mardina and Beth were a lot closer. His instinct was to obscure, to hide, to protect. Of course she might know all about his little group already.

Delga had aged, and life on Per Ardua had evidently toughened her; she looked scrawnier, more wrinkled, but strong, leathery. Her tattoos hadn’t faded, her face was just as blade-like, just as threatening. Despite the loss of that arm he was quite sure she’d have weapons available. As, indeed, he had.

He was trying to work through the shock. Just encountering another human being, any other human, here on this static world, changed everything. And now it turned out to be Delga.

Delga’s face was a tattooed mask, under a scalp shaven in elaborate whorls. Yuri barely knew her. He’d only come across her a couple of times on Mars. On the Ad Astra she’d been in the same hulk as him, but again he’d kept his distance. He’d wanted nothing to do with her products, her chain of contacts, her suppliers and users. The last time he’d seen her, he remembered now, she was leading a bunch of rebels up towards the ship’s bridge, after the arrival at Proxima. She was the type to have survived, he supposed.

He said now, ‘So what were you doing all the way out here?’

‘Stretching my legs. What do you think? The one thing this place does have is room, room to walk off until you’re over the horizon and alone. Can’t do that in a Martian hovel, right? Or in some hulk of a ship. Or on most of Earth these days, probably.’ She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. ‘I come out this way for the water. The springs. And there’s a hollow a little further out that way, more springs, but it just got flooded.’

She must mean the hollow that now held the jilla lake.

She looked at him, shrewd, analytical. ‘You don’t know this area well.’

‘No. We’re on the move.’

She picked that apart. ‘We. Who, how many? How heavily armed? On the move. From where, to where?’ She grinned. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll be sharing soon enough. You know, ice boy, of everybody in that dumb hulk I never picked you out as one of the survivors, here in the Bowl.’

The Bowl? The air ahead was misty; as they walked he thought he smelled water, but his view was blocked by a low rise, worn hills. ‘Why not me?’

‘Because, back in Eden, you came out of that cryo tank like you’d been dropped from the sky. You never fitted in, even on Mars. You didn’t make any contacts, you didn’t have any networks. You didn’t even have a way to pay off the Peacekeepers. We noticed you, though. The ice boy, right? Your name is Yuri.

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