Final Days

TWENTY-SEVEN

Florida Array, 8 February 2235

The hopper dropped from the sky later that afternoon, a bright fleck of silver resolving gradually into a brightly coloured tourist bus, descending on VTOL jets. Random detritus erupted from the car park as Saul watched from a short distance away. The bus rotated a few times before folding its wings away and landing, its turbines diminishing from a high-pitched whine to a low rumble.

He then jogged forward and climbed through the hatch as soon as it opened. He spotted Mitchell sitting in a cramped acceleration chair – just behind the pilot, who raised one hand in greeting before reaching back for his controls.

‘Saul.’ Mitchell smiled a greeting hesitantly, almost shyly. ‘It’s been a while.’

Saul stared back at him, his mind full of all the things he’d learned about Mitchell.

‘For Christ’s sake, man, at least sit down.’ Mitchell then glanced at the pilot. ‘Hey Sam? I think we can—’

The aircraft lurched immediately with an escalating howl, and Saul stumbled as he quickly pulled himself into the seat next to Mitchell’s. A light blinked on, and a computerized voice urged him to strap in.

‘Sorry,’ Sam called over one shoulder. ‘Figured it was best not to stick around here. We got shot at during our approach.’

While Saul strapped himself in, the sun went sliding past the window, as the hopper rotated in mid-air.

‘Olivia told me you were aiming to head for the Moon,’ he began.

Mitchell nodded. ‘And she explained what you’re planning to do. I mean about shutting down the whole Array.’

‘What else did she say?’

‘That you’d done a pretty good job of digging up a lt of classified information.’

‘I know about the Founder Network and the recovered artefacts, if that’s what you mean. And I also know what happened to you.’

The hopper quivered as its wings realigned themselves in preparation for boosting it into the high atmosphere. Somewhere beneath their feet, the engines built up to a noisy rumble, and Saul gripped his armrests as the acceleration pushed them back deep into their seats.

‘What gave you the idea of using the EDP codes?’ Mitchell yelled over the roar.

‘It was the obvious thing to do,’ Saul yelled back. ‘I mean, Jesus, think about what will happen if we don’t shut those gates down.’

‘That depends,’ said Mitchell, ‘on what you think really is happening.’

Saul frowned at him. ‘What?’

Mitchell waved a hand dismissively. ‘Forget it.’

‘Mitchell, I’ve argued this through with two other people, one of them Olivia. In the end, they both decided to help me. So if you want to know how I’m sure it’s the right course of action, then know that I am very, very damn sure.’

‘Even if it means having the blood of countless innocents on your hands, once you slam the door shut on all of them?’

Saul felt his face grow hot. ‘I know what the goddamned consequences are. But doing nothing would be a hell of a lot worse, don’t you think?’

Somehow, that had seemed to be the end of any further discussion for the remainder of their journey. Once their craft had levelled out, Saul found himself some quick-heating food in a crew locker and devoured it. He then fell asleep for a while, and dreamed he was back in that car, with Donohue shouting warnings about Mitchell, and woke only when the hopper began its final approach to the Roses’ private spaceport, his body racked by a bone-deep ache.

Little about the spaceport had changed over the years since Saul had last seen it. Two lengthy roads cut their way through scrubby desert, while a hangar complex, looking like yesterday’s vision of the future of space flight, sat next to the point where they converged. He saw several huge VASIMRs mounted on the backs of trucks, while an airstrip ran parallel to one of the roads. A small hotel and several other buildings of much more recent vintage were strung along the side of it. Rail tracks extended towards a launch pad consisting of a strip of blackened concrete, several kilometres distant from the hangar complex. A massive gantry stood in the centre of the launch pad, supporting a full-sized working replica of an ancient Apollo Saturn multi-stage rocket that towered over the landscape. The gantry had been empty the last time Saul had seen it, several years earlier, waiting for the Roses to finish a round of fund-raising with a consortium of billionaire adrenalin-junkies, so that the pair of them could build more rockets.

font face="Times New Roman">He gestured past Mitchell and out the window. ‘I never understood the appeal of going up in one of those things.’

‘Adventure,’ said Mitchell. ‘Doesn’t get much simpler than that.’

‘What’s wrong with VASIMRs, then?’

Mitchell chuckled. ‘Where’s the adventure in that?’

‘You sound like Jeff.’ Saul turned away from the window and let his head drop back against his seat. ‘Did I mention that I never forgave you for talking me into that sub-orbital jump?’

‘I didn’t talk you into it,’ Mitchell reminded him. ‘You just took pity on me after my brother died.’

‘You told me the experience would reaffirm my enthusiasm for life.’

Mitchell shrugged. ‘You sounded pretty enthusiastic to me, at the time. You were screaming all the way down.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m just glad it’s someone else who’ll be flying in that thing, instead of us.’

He glanced sideways at Mitchell and felt a frisson of alarm on seeing the look on his face.

‘We’re going up in a VASIMR, right?’

The corner of Mitchell’s mouth twitched. ‘We would be, except all the seats are taken.’

‘Who by?’

‘The ground control crew and their families. There are maybe a hundred of them, altogether, not including relations – all those responsible for the engineering, fuel supply, onboard systems and general maintenance. The ones that haven’t taken off already are going up as soon as we head up on board the Saturn.’

Before Saul could say anything more, a landing warning flashed, and the hopper began to decelerate hard. He watched buildings hurtle by, and a stretch of black tarmac blurring past, before the hopper’s engines came to a halt and it dropped down, with a gentle thump, next to what looked like some kind of administration building. Sam stood up and pushed open the hatch, letting sunlight spill into the aircraft’s interior.

The air outside tasted gritty, dry and furnace-hot. Saul shielded his eyes with one hand and glanced past the VASIMRs towards the Saturn rocket, clouds of steam now drifting down its sides. Centuries before, men had flown craft just like it all the way to the Moon and back, but the development of the wormhole technology had put paid to almost all of that.

‘Car’s on its way,’ announced the pilot, indicating an open-top vehicle approaching from the administration building.

‘You’l’s oing up in one of those?’ Saul gestured towards the VASIMRs.

Sam nodded. ‘Soon as we get lock-in from the orbital powersats, yeah.’

‘I rode in one once before,’ said Saul. ‘It was a pretty bumpy ride.’

Sam shrugged. ‘Sometimes that’s down to the weather conditions. They’ve been taking off from here round the clock, over the past couple of days. The ones parked over there’ll be the last to go up. You know the Saturn’s going to be much, much bumpier, right?’

‘No,’ Saul sighed, as the empty car stopped beside them, ‘I didn’t know that.’

The car wasn’t much more than a glorified golf cart. It carried them past a lone billboard advertising lunar flights, and then a prospective, VASIMR-powered tourist flight to Mars that was now clearly never going to happen. Saul saw a gaggle of men and women in hard hats standing by a VASIMR mounted on the back of an enormous truck that was parked next to one hangar. Their car came to a halt nearby, and one of the men came over, his dark and weather-beaten skin scored with deep wrinkles.

‘Mr Dumont,’ said the man, as they all climbed out, ‘I’m Lester Rose. I believe we met some years ago?’

‘Briefly,’ said Saul, shaking Lester’s hand as he was offered it.

Lester nodded. ‘Well, we’re going to get plenty reacquainted before long, because I’m gonna be one half of your flight crew.’

‘I’m sorry?’ said Saul, not quite able to hide his disbelief.

The old man chuckled. ‘Don’t look so worried. I’m an old hand at this game. Matter of fact, I was one half of the flight-crew on our last three launches, as well.’ He paused, then continued, ‘Jeff told me a lot about you. You two worked together, right?’

‘Yeah,’ Saul nodded, ‘although it was a long time ago.’

Lester’s expression became serious. ‘Jeff’s told me a lot of things, since he got in touch. I know what I heard on the news feeds, but’ – he glanced at the landscape around them, and shook his head slowly – ‘I’ll be honest with you, if it wasn’t for what I’ve seen on the news I’d have a hard time believing one damn word he told me. But Jeff’s a good man, so I know he ain’t going to lie to me.’

‘So if you’re one half of the flight crew,’ asked Saul, ‘who’s the other half?’

‘That’d be my wife, Amy,’ Lester replied. ‘She’s an engineer and pilot, and a good one, too, knows every ship we own inside and out.’ He turned to the hopper pilot. ‘Sam, you should get over to Bay Fifteen, give Arkady a hand. There’s something fishy going on with the fuel-gauge readings on bird number five.’

‘Sure thing.’ Sam headed over to the truck and began talking to one of the men standing nearby.

‘In case I don’t get the chance later,’ Mitchell said to Lester, ‘I want to thank you for holding the launch back for us. It means a lot to me.’

Lester shook his head. ‘Way I see it, we might all owe Jeff our lives. So if he wants us to give you a ride up, we’ll give you a ride up.’ His expression became uncertain. ‘It’s really going to be as bad as he says?’

‘Yes,’ said Saul, ‘it’s really going to be that bad.’

‘Right.’ Lester sniffed, staring out towards the horizon for a moment. ‘You know, a couple of generations back, a girl in my family went off to live on a mountain for a year with some people who all reckoned the end of the world was coming. Shaved her head, got herself pregnant, then a solar eclipse came and went, and she returned back down the mountain and found the world was still there. Everyone pretended it never happened, so she went on and got a regular job and never did anything crazy ever again. I can’t imagine how foolish she must have felt, but there’s a tiny part of me thinks maybe this is all the same kind of situation, and we’re all going to fly up there and find the world isn’t going away, and we’re all going to come home again feeling foolish. Do you know what I mean?’

‘If I thought shaving my head and going to live on a mountain might help things to come out any other way,’ said Saul, ‘I’d be reaching for the razor right now.’

Lester nodded with a look of inexpressible sadness. ‘Come on,’ he said, and led them through the hangar towards a side-office. ‘I’ll introduce you to Amy.’

Amy Rose proved to be an equally leather-skinned old person in her eighties, who had once worked on the early construction of Kepler’s biomes, and even helped carry out course adjustments on board one of the CTC-gate-carrying starships. When she wasn’t reminding Saul and Mitchell that she was too busy to retire, she was airing her political convictions.

‘We fucked ’em over every which way for no good reason,’ she said, when Saul described the invasion of Sophia he’d witnessed. ‘The colonies, that is. Should’a shared the technology with the Sphere nations a long time ago.’

‘Amy,’ intervened Lester, a note of warning in his voice, but this only earned him a scowl from his wife.

‘No, Lester,’ she continued, scowling, ‘long as they could control all the gate traffic, they reckoned they could keep the colonies under their thumb. The human race could have expanded a lot further out into the galaxy by now, if it weren’t for that kind of shortsighted thinking. That’s how they’ve maintained the same historical imbalance between rich and poor, even over light-years. Enough to make you sick.’ She shook her head with evident disgust.

‘When are we going up?’ asked Saul.

‘First thing tomorrow morning,’ replied Amy.

Ice trickled through Saul’s veins. ‘That soon?’

‘That soon,’ Amy echoed. ‘In the meantime, you look like you could use a night’s sleep.’

They put Saul up in a hotel next to the runway, where he woke early the next morning, still feeling bruised and sore and tired. Mitchell had already departed the room he’d taken next door to Saul’s own, and so Saul ate alone in the hotel’s tiny restaurant, staring out across the desert landscape towards the Saturn rocket a few kilometres distant.

Lester picked him up just before eight, driving him to another building nearby that turned out to contain a suite of changing rooms, the walls lined with sportswear-model spacesuits. He found Mitchell there, following Amy’s detailed instructions and by that time already halfway into donning his own suit.

Amy waved Saul over to join them, ordering him to strip down before showing him how to put on a pair of rubber-lined long johns studded with flexible microscopic monitors. Following that, he clambered inside one of the racked spacesuits, which proved to be a one-piece garment entered through a diagonal zip running from the crotch all the way up to one shoulder. A how-to, uploaded to his contacts, described the function of each piece of equipment his suit contained in interminable detail, before guiding him through a full systems check that required him to put on a helmet and pressurize the suit to check for potential leaks or any other problems. Once he had the helmet on, icons appeared along the bottom of its curved interior surface, each bearing a name: Saul, Amy, Mitchell and Lester.

‘Jesus,’ exclaimed Amy, when she noticed Saul struggling to remove his helmet a few minutes later. ‘Trust an amateur.’ With a sorrowful look, she helped him unlock it from his suit’s neck ring.

‘How does the suit feel?’ she asked.

‘Itchy,’ Saul replied. ‘Not very easy to move.’

‘Believe me, it’ll be harder once we get to the lunar surface, but we’ll be there to guide you along the way.’ She turned and snapped her fingers at Mitchell, until she had his attention, too. ‘Didn’t you say Saul’s been up in space before?’

‘Just a sub-orb jump,’ Mitchell replied, still adjusting the fabric hood he had pulled over his head.

‘Right,’ Amy turned back to Saul, ‘well, this time it’s going to be a little different. We’re launching way ahead of schedule as it is, which means you need to be ready for anything.’

‘Like what?’

She patted his shoulder. ‘I wouldn’t want to worry your pretty little head with the grisly details. You’ve got your rubber underwear on, that’s the main thing.’

Mitchell glanced across at him. ‘Like when we jumped,’ he explained. ‘You have to pee inside your suit, remember?’

‘Somehow I’d managed to wipe that detail from my mind,’ Saul grumbled. ‘What about, uh, everything else?’

‘There’s a hose attachment for that,’ said Lester, helpfully.

‘Just remind me,’ said Saul, now flexing his arms and knees. ‘There are people who actually pay for this experience?’

Lester started to reply just as a mild tremor rolled through the ground under their feet, lasting several seconds in all.

‘I’d better go check on things,’ Amy said quickly.

Saul watched her hurry away. ‘How much trouble could a tremor like that cause?’ he asked Lester.

‘Hard to say.’ Lester shrugged, as he finished climbing into his own suit. ‘Doesn’t take much more than a cracked exhaust pipe or fuel line to cause more trouble than you’d believe. We’ve been very lucky we weren’t forced to postpone the launch a few days more, but the faster we can get up now, safety permitting, the better chance we have of avoiding any trouble.’ He waved a beckoning hand to the both of them. ‘All right, we’re about done here. Keep your suits on and come with me.’

Saul picked up his helmet and trailed after Mitchell and Lester, down a narrow passageway decorated with images of vintage spacecraft from centuries past. Every step he took in the heavy boots felt as exaggerated and forced as if he were fleeing some nameless dread in a nightmare.

The flight control room adjoined to the rear of the hangar, and consisted of little more than a low-lit booth with several wall-mounted screens, each showing a different view of the Saturn, either from close up or some considerable distance. Several personnel were crammed into this small space, all of whom greeted Lester by his first name before returning to their tasks. Saul listened to them quietly mutter to each other about liquid fuel ratios and payloads, their eyes fixed on one display or another.

‘This is it?’ Saul asked Lester. ‘I thought there’d be more to it.’

‘Technically speaking, we don’t even need this room,’ replied Lester. ‘We could run the whole thing through our contacts, if we wanted.’

‘Except you need at least a dozen people working together on something this complex,’ said one of the technicians, a narrow-faced woman with blonde hair. ‘And they need to talk to each other constantly. There’s too much that could go wrong, and just slip right by you, if you’re not careful. So run it from your contacts, my ass, Lester.’

‘Ginny,’ Lester retorted, in a tone of mocking disapproval.

She turned round in her seat to face Saul and Mitchell. ‘We’ll be here for the first part of your launch,’ she explained. ‘There are too many variables and things that need to be monitored for us not all to be keeping an eye on things. But as soon as you’re out of orbit and well on your way, we’re heading up ourselves.’

Saul stared up at the image of the Saturn. ‘And there’s really no room for us on one of the VASIMRs?’

Ginny just looked at him like he was crazy.

It took another hour for the launch technicians to run the final safety checks, before it was safe for them to board. Amy returned from her other duties looking hot and tired. She appeared to be even older than Lester, but it was clear they enjoyed tremendous loyalty from their staff. Saul thought he understood why, for there was something about them that seemed as permanent and unchanging as the desert outside. He watched as the Roses took turns in hugging each of their staff in turn, talking over their plans to reunite once they had all reached Copernicus.

He leaned in towards Mitchell, who sat next to him on a bench at the rear of the booth. ‘They know not to stop once they get to the Lunar Array, right?’ he asked, under his breath. ‘They can’t risk stopping until they reach one of the colonies.’

Mitchell shook his head. ‘Jeff told them not to stick around Copernicus, put it that way. Listen, while we’re on the subject, I’ve been thinking about your plan to shut down the Array. I’m not sure you’ve thought it through as thoroughly as you could have.’

‘How so?’

‘How many EDP codes did you get hold of?’

‘Just the one,’ Saul admitted.

‘Maybe you don’t know this, but you’ll need at least two people before you can trigger a wormhole collapse. It’s not something you can do without help.’

‘That depends. Why, are you going to help me?’

‘Of course I am,’ Mitchell replied. ‘but how the hell do you propose to do it with only one EDP code?’

‘I don’t need more than one EDP code, not if one end of the Florida–Copernicus gate falls out of contact with the other. When that happens, everything changes, and the system will accept just the one code for all the colony gates.’

A look of anger flickered across Mitchell’s face, just for a second, before he repressed it. ‘Are you sure of that?’ he asked.

‘t’s the one scrap of hope I have left to hang on to,’ Saul replied, remembering the things Olivia had said about Mitchell and knowing, in that moment, exactly what she had meant.

A little while later, Saul and Mitchell, accompanied by Lester, Amy and a couple of their technicians, boarded a small bus that carried them towards the Saturn rocket, standing tall and glorious in its gantry. The sky above was a perfect vivid blue, and Saul had the sudden terrible realization that this was the last time he would ever see it. He felt like a man on the way to his own execution.

The Saturn grew larger, the closer they approached, until Saul realized how immense the thing really was. He vaguely recalled archival footage of the earliest days of the space race: images of eerily similar gantries populated by hard-hatted technicians, and rooms filled with scientists and engineers working with impossibly primitive technology.

‘I’m not sure I really believe this thing is anywhere near as authentic as they say,’ Saul muttered quietly to Mitchell.

‘Gotta make some concessions,’ said Lester from up front, having obviously overheard everything he’d said. ‘Plus, nobody really wants to get blown up on the pad because of a valve that’s faulty simply because it doesn’t use up-to-date specifications.’

‘So . . .’

‘So the onboard computer systems are modern, all other appearances notwithstanding, and the whole thing’s built from similar composites to what they use in VASIMRs.’ He gazed over his shoulder at Saul, elbow resting on the back of a seat. ‘Plus, the original birds only carried three people, not five. The experience is the important thing. It just has to feel authentic, regardless of whether it really is authentic.’

And it’s the last of its kind, thought Saul. He wondered how the Roses managed to cope; the way they were acting you’d almost think it was any other day, but maybe that was just what they had to do to keep it all together.

Saul heard a rumble echoing from somewhere behind him, and turned to see one of the VASIMRs taking off at a terrifyingly steep angle. He craned his head to watch as it rose higher and higher, and caught sight of the Moon floating serenely above the top of the gantry.

As the bus came to a stop by the base of the gantry, they all climbed out, Lester and Amy leading them over to an open elevator platform. A cluster of UP-compatible icons appeared around the elevator as Saul approached, mostly tourist stuff offering him the chance to view interactive information about the launch. Saul decided he’d like that just fine, since pretty much anything that took his mind off what he was about to do seemed like a good thing. Tiny, primary-coloured animations demonstrated the flow of fuel within the tanks, and also their expected trajectory in the seconds and minutes following take-off.

The elevator swiftly carried the six of them up, before clanging to a halt near the gantry’s peak. Saul looked down through a window towards the ground and swayed slightly, one hand on the rail. It felt as if the land below pulling him back towards it with something more than mere gravity.

Grief overwhelmed him at that moment with a nearly physical force, as if he were understanding for the first time just how much they were losing. It was as if it fell out of the sky, unexpected as a lightning bolt on a calm spring day, before wrapping itself around his chest and squeezing until he could no longer breathe.

‘Easy there,’ he heard Mitchell say to him, as if from very far away.

‘I can’t . . .’ Saul gasped.

Mitchell leaned in close to him. ‘What’s happening out there,’ he whispered, casting his gaze around the bowl of the sky, ‘isn’t what you think it is.’

What the hell does that mean? Saul wondered. But, before he had the chance to ask, Lester was beckoning him towards the open hatch in the side of the spacecraft, which was reached by a short bridge connecting the gantry to the rocket.

‘Get your helmet on and go first,’ said Lester, with a sympathetic expression. ‘Just take your time, and be careful as you go inside.’

Saul nodded and clicked his helmet into place, then waited a few moments while one of the two technicians, a young woman named Sandy, double-checked its seal. Then she and the other technician, an older man named Frank, guided him across the bridge, before helping him climb in through the hatch feet-first.

Saul carefully manoeuvred himself inside, and felt a surge of claustrophobia as he looked around the dark and cramped interior of the capsule. It looked considerably more primitive than he’d feared.

A great deal of shuffling and manoeuvring was required as Lester, then Amy, and lastly Mitchell took turns to climb through the hatch. Amy directed Saul to get into one of five reclining acceleration seats – two up front and three behind, each mounted on shock-absorbers. When Frank climbed inside as well, the capsule became almost comically crowded. After a bit more shuffling, Frank carefully strapped first Saul and then Mitchell into two of the three rear couches before hooking them each up to the air supply.

Saul looked around with a growing sense of dismay as Lester collapsed into one of the two front seats, studying a battered manual held in one hand while he began flipping toggle switches on an instrument panel with the other. Everything here was hard-edged and intensely physical, a direct contrast to the soft, rounded edges of most technology he had encountered throughout his life.

After a moment Saul’s UP locked into the capsule’s data network, and a series of softly glowing displays, rendered in three dimensions, materialized around both the pilot and the co-pilot seats. He felt himself relax a little, realizing it was like Lester had said – it might look primitive, but appearances could be deceptive.

He noticed Amy watching him. ‘It looks basic, but only on the surface,’ she said, tapping at a check-list floating in the air before her. ‘Ito;s like Lester said, a lot of what you see here is just for show.’

Saul nodded in appreciation, working hard not to let her see just how scared he really was. His mouth felt paper-dry, his heart hammering so hard in his chest he wondered if he was in danger of having a stroke.

Frank finished strapping Lester into the co-pilot’s seat, then performed the same task for Amy before finally exiting the capsule and securing the hatch behind him. A moment later Saul heard Ginny speaking to Lester over a shared A/V link.

‘All electrical systems look fine,’ he heard her say, ‘but we should have run a proper pre-launch check on the engines. Shit like that can get you killed.’

Amy cackled. ‘Any problems with those and I’ll be too busy decorating the desert to worry about them. Just set us a countdown, and we’ll be on our way.’

‘Yeah, roger that,’ said Ginny, her voice tense. ‘You’re go for launch in one hour. And . . . good luck. We’ll see you there in a couple of day’s time.’

‘That we will, sweetheart,’ Saul heard Lester say with undisguised fondness. ‘Good luck to all of you as well.’

Amy and Lester spent the better part of the next hour going over a series of interminable system checks. They talked about heat exchangers, fuel mixes, control valves and power assemblies. If Saul had really wanted to know what they were referring to, he could have checked with the how-to, but instead he stared up at the capsule’s ceiling, waiting for it to all be over.

Once the countdown fell below ten minutes, Saul’s helmet began showing him the last seconds ticking away prior to liftoff. Thirty seconds before the display indicated zero, the capsule lurched very softly, while a crescendo-ing roar grew to such a volume that further thought became almost impossible. The countdown passed zero and they began to climb and, before very long, an invisible block of iron began to press down on Saul. Powerful vibrations shook his couch with such force that his vision blurred.

‘Hey, Dumont,’ Amy called over the shared comms, ‘any history of heart problems? Anything like that?’

Saul struggled to form a coherent answer in the face of what he felt certain was his imminent death. ‘No,’ he finally managed. ‘Not that I know of.’

‘Good answer,’ she replied. ‘Because, under normal circumstances, no way in hell we’d have let you get on this boat without six months of medical check-ups and a daily work-out in the gym.’

‘He got checked out just fine before we went on our jump,’ Saul heard Mitchell announce.

That was ten years ago, Saul wanted to say, but his throat refused to form any words.

Finding he could access a ground-basedvideo feed of their launch through his contacts, he was shocked to see how far the Saturn had already climbed. A pillar of flame billowed out from its engines, nearly overloading the filters of the cameras as they angled upwards to follow their progress.

The whole craft meanwhile shook with an insane violence. All Saul could do was stare fixedly at the back of Amy’s and Lester’s heads, visible through the clear polycarbonate shells of their helmets, while they continued to throw technicalities at each other with enthusiastic abandon.

After another minute, a loud metallic boom jerked him hard against his restraints. His heart nearly stopped from sheer fright.

‘That’s first-stage separation,’ explained Lester. ‘Second stage kicking in now. And a nice even burn, if I may say so,’ he added with clear approval. ‘We’re doing good, folks. On any other day, I’d be popping champagne corks for a flight this smooth. So just hang in there.’

The shuddering began to diminish, and the intense pressure slowly began to abate. Lester had the grace to at least warn him of what was coming next, when the module shook with even more furious force.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Saul yelled.

‘We’re dumping our second stage now,’ Lester explained. ‘They’re so much dead weight once you’ve used the fuel they contain, so down they go. Check your how-to and you’ll see a live feed of it falling behind us. Only the best for our customers, right, sweetheart?’

‘Except he ain’t payin’,’ said Amy. ‘Nothing less than the end of the world’s going to get you a free ride in this firework.’

Saul distracted himself once more with the how-to, which showed him a cylindrical section of the craft falling behind them, spinning away as it receded. The Earth was falling behind as well, a storm front fast spreading along the North-west Seaboard.

The roar had now faded, but the air was filled instead with the sound of pinging metal and creaking bulkheads. Saul felt his weight slipping away. His stomach lurched as he remembered his long drop to the ground, years before, and he fought a surge of panic, clenching and unclenching his fists until it passed.

‘Not much of a head for heights, has he?’ he heard Amy remark.

‘Yeah, well,’ said Mitchell, ‘that’s probably my fault.’

Before long they were unstrapping themselves and changing out of their spacesuits into loose-fitting overalls handed out by Amy. Lester and his wife kept them both busy after that, occupying their minds with small, routine maintenance tasks; but only those, Saul suspected, unlikely to result in any life-threatening failures.

Over those first several hours of their journey, he came to know the three of them better than he’d ever really wanted to know any other human being. The cabin was too cramped and space too valuable for anything resembling privacy to be remotely possible, although, when they ate, the food proved to be distinctly more palatable than he might have reasonably expected. It was far from being high cuisine, mostly consisting of reconstituted dried food meant to reflect the diet of the original Apollo astronauts but, for all that, Saul felt considerably calmer after finishing his first meal in zero gravity.

They climbed back into their seats while Lester first separated the lunar lander, then spun the command and service modules together through a hundred and eighty degrees to rejoin with the lander via the docking hatch. Once the air pressure had balanced, he opened up the docking tunnel to the lander and pulled himself through, returning a few minutes later.

‘Once we’re in lunar orbit, we’ll separate the lander again and it’ll take us all down to the surface of the Moon,’ he explained to Saul and Mitchell. ‘Any time you want to rest, or need the extra elbow space, you can head through to the lander. There are some sleeping bags there you can hook up to the bulkheads.’

‘I’ve decided,’ announced Saul, ‘that if I live through the next couple of days, I’m never wearing clothes again. Wearing that damn suit put me off them for life.’

He floated at a ninety-degree angle to Mitchell inside the lander, his brain tissues liberally soaked in barbiturates Amy had provided him with from her medical kit. Their pilot and co-pilot were still in the command module, talking with the crew of the last VASIMR to lift off. Almost every surface in the lander was covered in banks of toggle switches and dials, leaving Saul terrified of bumping into any of them.

‘It’s not so bad, really,’ said Mitchell. ‘At least not when you think about what explorers had to cope with in previous centuries, like starvation, scurvy, dehydration. At least Armstrong didn’t have to worry about getting a spear through his chest when he landed on the Moon.’

‘I guess,’ Saul conceded, then peered back through into the command module, where he could just see the top of Amy’s and Lester’s heads. ‘Do we know what’s happening back home?’

‘The feed reports are getting pretty confused.’ Mitchell glanced towards Lester and Amy, and dropped his voice. ‘You ought to know, one of the VASIMRs didn’t make it into orbit.’

‘What happened?’

‘Fuel-line break. Might be due to the tremors, or maybe because everything was so rushed. Ginny was on board, so Lester and Amy are having a hard time of it. You see, Ginny was their niece.’

‘Shit.’

‘Not that you could really tell. They’re so good at keeping things buttoned up.’

‘Well, thanks, I guess, for letting me know.’

&lsoLester also grabbed some public feeds from back home, and . . . well,’ he shrugged. ‘I guess you’d better see for yourself.’

Most of what Saul then received from Mitchell, a moment later, consisted of amateur footage recorded either on witnesses’ contacts or handheld video recorders. All featured bright twists of light that danced through city streets, reducing them to dust within seconds. The view from hovering camera-drones showed the same twists of light roaming across suburbs and crowded cities, leaving nothing in their path but dense choking clouds of dust rising above a grey and featureless landscape. Dense conurbations, filled with people and traffic and homes, disappeared in an instant. Other video segments showed the same disaster happening to forests, grassy mountain slopes and equatorial jungles, the soil turned to lifeless grey ash that billowed up to blot out the sun. Yet another segment showed the same twists of light dancing around a growth, like so many glowing snowflakes.

The next time he looked at Mitchell, Saul felt like he’d aged another decade. ‘I don’t know if I really believed what was happening, until now.’

‘You wouldn’t have any trouble believing it if you were still stuck down below there,’ remarked Mitchell.

‘Look . . .’ Saul let out a sigh. ‘We’re not going to get too many chances like this to talk about what we’re actually intending to do once we reach Copernicus or the Lunar Array. Getting past whatever security operation is still running up there is going to be one of our biggest priorities.’

‘Agreed,’ said Mitchell.

‘But the real priority is triggering an Array-wide shutdown. And for that I still need your help.’

Mitchell threw him an appraising look. ‘I got the impression earlier that you didn’t need anyone else.’

‘I can trigger a shutdown on my own, sure, but only once the Lunar Array’s security systems fall out of contact with Florida. I don’t know how much time that’s going to leave either one of us to set the shutdown in motion. For all I know, it might not be anywhere near long enough. But if we had a second code, it might make all the difference.’

‘Except,’ said Mitchell, ‘you don’t have a second code.’

‘No, but we need to head for the Lunar ASI offices before any code at all can be activated. While we’re there, it might be worth scanning through the servers to see if we can find any kind of information that might help us.’

‘That’s a seriously long shot,’ said Mitchell, looking unconvinced.

‘Better than no shot,’ Saul replied. ‘A little while ago,’ he said, ‘I had the feeling that maybe you weren’t so keen on helping me with this.’

Mitchell hesitated. &lsuoThe only thing that makes me hesitate is knowing I’d be complicit in something that would make people revile the pair of us for a thousand years, if they ever learned what we’d done.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’ Saul snapped. ‘Or that it hasn’t been on my mind every single second since it first occurred to me? If you know a better way to stop the rest of the human race from extinction, I’m fucking desperate to hear it. Really, truly desperate. If there was any other way—’

‘Saul,’ Mitchell put up a hand, ‘I get it. I understand.’

‘Just so I know I can count on you.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Mitchell, flashing him a grin full of bright, sharp teeth.