Free Proxima by Stephen Baxter

fear.
    ‘Angelia?’
    ‘I’m here, Dr Kalinski.’
    ‘How do I sound?’
    ‘Like you’re in a room with me.’
    ‘Good. That’s how I wanted it to be. I’m glad we had time to be human together. Because you are part of humanity, you know. The best and brightest part. You are named for a
daughter of Hermes, the Greek version of Mercury. She too was a messenger, a bringer of tidings. You will carry the news of our existence to another star. And you will carry all our dreams. Mine,
anyway. Well, we said all that. You know we can’t communicate while the beam is firing. We’ll talk to you in four days, when the acceleration is done. All right?’
    ‘Yes, sir. I think—’
    ‘We won’t put you through a countdown. Godspeed, Angelia . . .’
    The power station lit up in her vision, which was sensitised to the beam’s microwave frequencies. Mercury receded, as if falling down a well.
    The intense radiation, intended originally to deliver compact solar power to the factories and homes of distant Earth, now filled her own hundred-metre-sail body. She felt her skin stretch and
billow as terawatts of power poured over her. It was not even necessary for her structure to be solid; her surface was a sparse mesh, a measure to reduce her overall density, but the wavelengths of
the microwave photons were so long that they could not pass through this wide, curving net of carbon struts. And the microwave photons, bouncing off the sail like so many minute sand grains, shoved
her backwards, at thirty-six gravities, piling up an extra thousand kilometres per hour of velocity with each new second.
    Despite the increasing distance, the intensity of that laser beam, focused by the lens, did not diminish, not by a watt. It was agony. It was delicious. She laughed, deep in her distributed
consciousness.
    The intensity did not diminish for four days, by which time she had been flung more than a hundred times Earth’s distance from the sun, far beyond the orbit of the
furthest planet.
    From here, the sun, the monster that dominated Mercury’s sky, was no more than a bright star – and a star that was very subtly reddened in her sophisticated sensors, for she had
already reached her interstellar cruising speed, of two-fifths of the speed of light. At such a speed she would reach Proxima in a mere decade. Orders of magnitude less energy had been expended to
get her this far, this fast, than had been spent on Dexter Cole. But he, cryo-frozen, had been embedded in a thousand-tonne craft; she was a mere eighty kilograms – the mass of a human, as if
Cole, naked, had been thrust to the edge of interstellar space.
    She
was the craft herself. And she, indeed, was a throng; she would never be alone.
    With an effort of will, a subtle reprogramming of her structure, she turned her senses outward, to the void.

 
     
     
     
CHAPTER 12
    2169
     
     
     
    T he shuttle was to stay on the ground for ten days, before returning to the
Ad Astra
.
    The main task for the crew in this interval was unloading, assembling and installing the colonists’ supplies and gear. The colonists, meanwhile, were put to work constructing irrigation
ditches to a nearby lake, and making a start on a shelter, dug into the ground.
    The shelter was for protection from stellar storms. Proxima flared. It happened once or twice a day. You could see it with the naked eye; whole provinces would light up on the star’s big
dim surface, like a nuclear war going on up there. The planet, Prox c, had a thick atmosphere and a healthy ozone layer, but about once a month, it was thought, there would be a storm severe enough
to require more protection. For now, if a bad flare came they would be allowed back in the shuttle. But in future they would be scurrying into holes in the ground.
    For the rest of their lives.
    Ten days until the shuttle left: that was one important time interval in Yuri’s life. The other, told them by the crew, was eight Earth days and eight hours.