Final Days

TWENTY-EIGHT

Translunar Space, 10 February 2235

Saul climbed into one of the sleeping bags in the lander, and blacked out more than just fell asleep. He woke several hours later, groggy and bedevilled by a thousand aches and pains, his sleeping bag twisted slightly where it had been Velcroed to a bulkhead. He saw Mitchell, snoring loudly, wrapped in another sleeping bag across the lander.

Saul swallowed to get rid of the dry, gummy taste in his mouth, and spent the next few minutes figuring out how to unzip himself from the bag and its Velcro straps. He then kicked himself through to the command module, finding Lester and Amy still at their stations.

‘Still alive?’ asked Amy, glancing up at him.

‘Barely,’ Saul mumbled. ‘What’s the latest?’

‘See for yourself,’ suggested Lester, without turning.

A second or two later, Saul found himself watching live satellite feeds of Europe and Africa. He could just make out the coasts of Morocco and South Africa, and saw that both landmasses had become almost entirely hidden under an impenetrable grey haze. Occasional streaks of light chased each other through the ashen murk, come and gone so quickly that they almost didn’t register.

Saul scanned through more feeds and saw that, although the same haze had not yet crossed the Atlantic to North America’s eastern seaboard, it could nonetheless be seen approaching from the other direction, spreading across the Bering Straits, and reaching as far as the northern tip of Alaska.

He inhaled loudly through his nose, fighting off a surge of bile that rose into the back of his throat. A billion years of evolution, and millennia of human history, all wiped out of existence in the course of just a few days. It defied comprehension. Olivia and Jeff came to mind in that moment, and he prayed they had managed to shut down the Inuvik gate in time.

‘Try not to throw up, son,’ said Lester. ‘It’s more dangerous than you think.’

‘I won’t,’ Saul gasped, tasting sour phlegm. He floated, eyes shut, with one hand gripping the back of Lester’s seat.

‘He’ll be fine,’ Amy muttered. ‘Barbiturates’ll keep him from puking too bad.’

‘Saul, did you notice anything weird?’ asked Lester. ‘About the distribution of those clouds, I mean.’

Saul forced himself to open his eyes again, despite a rush of dizziness. ‘Weird in what way?’

‘I ran a comparison between the spread of the clouds and some speculative climate simulations designed to predict the effect of nuclear winter and major eruptions – that kind of thing. From what I can tell, they’re not acting like clouds are supposed to act. They’re moving against the prevailing winds, for a start, except for where there’s a storm system in the Indian Ocean.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t even begin to tell you how much that scares me. It’s like those clouds are alive.’

‘Worst thing,’ Amy muttered, ‘is not even knowing what started it all.’

‘How much did Jeff tell you about the growths?’ asked Saul.

‘Well.’ Lester squinted, as if uncomfortable with the subject, ‘more than we wanted to hear, to be honest. Mainly he talked about some whole big network of CTC gates leading all over the galaxy. He talked about so much stuff it was kind of hard to take a lot of it on board.’

‘Did he tell you about stealing confidential files from a secret research platform out at Tau Ceti?’

‘He did, yes.’ Lester nodded. ‘But what you just said there is about the sum of what he told us.’

‘We only got the essential details,’ Amy added. ‘But Olivia did say you had copies of the files. Did you bring them with you?’

‘I did. They’re all the proof you need. Here they are.’

Their expressions glazed over for several seconds, as they each received their own copies of the stolen files.

‘There’s a lot of stuff there,’ Saul warned them. ‘It took me a good few hours just to skim through the document abstracts. Jeff wanted to broadcast it all to the world, but it looks like he ended up on the run instead.’

‘Not that there’s much of a world left to broadcast it to,’ Amy said quietly.

‘A couple of days ago I was on Newton,’ said Saul. ‘The military have been moving thir people through, and staging an armed takeover of the colonies. They’re desperate to suppress any evidence that the growths reaching Earth was the result of human error.’

‘Then why are you giving this to us?’ asked Lester, refocusing his gaze on Saul.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Lester,’ said Amy, her tone sharply admonishing, ‘they want the colonists to know what happened. That’s what Olivia said, remember? And damn right, too.’

‘You can carry the files in your contacts through to whichever colony you head for,’ said Saul. ‘Same for the rest of your people on the VASIMRs. Do you have secure links you can use to forward those files to the rest of your people?’

‘Sure do,’ said Amy. ‘Matter of fact, I’m doing it right now.’

‘We’re getting news back from some of the others who’ve already got to the Lunar Array,’ said Lester. ‘They got detained at first, but then they were allowed through to Da Vinci, along with almost everyone from Copernicus City. From what we’re hearing, it looks like most of whoever they want to bring through from Earth is already through.’ His expression became troubled. ‘But I can’t stop thinking about those millions of refugees back in Florida. It makes no damn sense, just leaving them there to die like that. Couldn’t they at least save some of them?’

‘I don’t know,’ Saul admitted.

‘Oh, it makes sense, all right,’ said Amy, ‘in a twisted, callous kind of way. The colonies haven’t been around all that long, and most of them can only sustain small populations, as it is – especially places like Newton, with the sealed biomes. They’d be hard pushed to cope with even a small increase in their populations.’

‘You’re sure of that?’ Saul asked.

‘Think about it,’ she said, her tone flat. ‘It’s what they call a cold equation. There just isn’t enough food, water and air to go round. It’s the logic of the lifeboat: if you’ve got a lifeboat big enough for six people but seven hundred are drowning all around you, there’s no way you can get more than a tiny fraction of that number into the lifeboat without sinking it and drowning everyone.’

She reached over the back of her chair to touch Saul’s arm. ‘You did a good thing getting those files here, son. There’s nothing we can do for those people back there, much as it makes me sick to admit it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do our damnedest to make sure the ones responsible for all this will pay for what they’ve done.’

Saul came to a decision and pulled himself into the seat directly behind Amy’s. ‘There’s something I need to tell you both. When we get to the Moon, I’m going to try and shut the Array down – collapse every one of the wormholes.’

‘St it down?’ said Lester, a confused look on his face. ‘Is that even possible?’

‘Maybe Lester and Amy have got enough on their plates right now,’ interrupted Mitchell, pulling himself through from the lander.

Saul jerked his head around in surprise. ‘You’re awake.’

‘No,’ insisted Amy, ‘I want to hear what Saul has to say.’

Saul turned back to her. ‘Take a look at the files I just sent you. Particularly the video sequences listed under “Copernicus”.’

Amy stared sideways at a bulkhead, as Mitchell floated down to join them, with a look of disapproval on his face. ‘Okay, I’ve got it.’ She frowned. ‘Hey, it looks like—’

‘Like something’s completely devastated the entire city. Is that what you’re seeing?’

She stared in silence at the bulkhead for several more seconds. ‘Shit,’ she said at length. ‘That’s just about right.’

‘Whatever’s about to happen on Earth is going to happen to Copernicus as well, and it’s going to be soon. So I need to shut the gates down before the same thing can happen to the colonies. I’m telling you this so you’ll understand why you can’t hang around once we get up there. You have to find your way through a gate as soon as possible, or you’ll be stranded.’

‘How sure are you that you need to do this?’ Lester demanded.

‘All I know,’ Saul said truthfully, ‘is that I’ve seen what’s going to happen to the Moon, and the only way it could have got there is via the Array.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Lester. ‘It had to have come through the Array on the way to Earth, right? Maybe they had more of those artefacts stored up there in Copernicus, somewhere. Maybe they caused it?’

‘He’s got a point,’ said Mitchell. ‘You can’t deny it’s a possibility.’

‘Jesus, Mitch,’ Saul rounded on him, ‘don’t you think you’re clutching at straws?’

‘But it’s at least a possibility,’ said Lester, his expression pained.

Amy reached out and touched her husband’s shoulder. ‘No, Lester, what Saul’s saying makes sense. We can’t put our hope on a distant possibility. We have to think for the rest of the human race.’

‘Not all of our people have made a landing yet,’ Lester insisted, suddenly looking all of his years. ‘We already lost Ginny. What if the rest of them couldn’t get through in time?’

‘I’ve seen what’s happening back home – just like you have,’ she said, her voice gentle now. ‘Way I see it, we have a moral obligation to do everything we can to help Saul. I just wish we had a name for the thing causing all of this. Otherwise everything feels so . . .’ She shrugged ‘. . . so random.’

Saul glanced at Mitchell in time to see him shake his head, and push himself back up towards the tunnel leading into the lander.

‘If no more people are being allowed through the Array,’ said Saul, ‘then maybe you’re right, Amy. There’s too many of them for the colonies.’

Amy looked at him with old eyes. ‘Just tell me you don’t want to be the one to have to do this.’

‘I don’t want to be the one to have to do this,’ affirmed Saul, with all the feeling he could muster.

Saul made his way through to the lander, where he found Mitchell waiting.

‘What the hell was all that about?’ Saul demanded. ‘They’ve got every right to know what we’re intending to do.’

‘I just thought they’d been through enough,’ Mitchell replied mildly. ‘You didn’t really need to tell them you were planning on triggering a shutdown.’

‘They got us this far, they deserve to know.’

‘I don’t know, Saul. Sounded to me more like you were making a confession.’

There was just enough truth in what Mitchell had said to hit home. ‘Listen,’ Saul was angry now, ‘something happened to you that I can’t even begin to understand. I saw the footage of you falling into that pit, then being pulled out of it. I read reports that said you’d died and come back. How is that even possible?’

‘It depends,’ said Mitchell, ‘on your definition of life and death.’

‘Is all of that why you’re acting so different? You said, just before we launched, that none of this was going to be as bad as I might think. What the hell did that mean?’

Mitchell shook his head and sighed. ‘I shouldn’t have said it.’

‘Give me,’ Saul insisted, ‘an explanation.’

‘Look, when they pulled me out of that pit, I was changed. That’s true. I . . . I knew things. Things about the Founder races, about how the network came into existence, where they went to after they disappeared.’

Saul could hardly believe what he was hearing. ‘How?’

‘I don’t know how. I just woke up and it was all there, swirling around inside my head. But when I said what I said back then, I was trying to tell you something for which I seriously doubt there are words – something so far outside of my own experience or that of any other human being that I’m still struggling to comprehend it. Once I do, assuming I ever do, I’ll try and choose my words more carefully. I’m sorry.’

Saul hesitated. After all, his worries stemmed from a single unfinished statement from Donohue, hardly a man he felt he could trust at the best of times. But, then again, something had put Olivia on edge as well.

‘There’s still something you’re not telling me,’ said Saul. ‘I don’t know what, but I’ve been in my job long enough to know when someone’s not being straight with me.’

‘I’m sorry you don’t trust me,’ said Mitchell, ‘but what happened to me isn’t my fault.’

Saul stared at him, feeling even more frightened than he cared to admit to himself.

Saul had already found that time on board the spacecraft became strangely elastic in the absence of any clear evidence of day or night. Amy and Lester appeared to have run out of minor maintenance checks for either himself or Mitchell to perform and, although he had little else to do, he didn’t have the stomach to keep watching the slow march of death as it continued to spread across the face of the planet. He dozed intermittently, but both module and lander were filled with constant creaks and rattles that did little to soothe his nerves. At one point he awoke to find Mitchell zipped into a sleeping bag across the lander from him, apparently asleep. Yet Saul could see, from the way the other man’s eyes moved under their closed lids, that he was watching or reading something via his contacts.

When Saul awoke a few hours later, he unzipped himself from his bag and ventured back through to the command module. He sat down next to Amy while her husband was sleeping, securely strapped across the three rear passenger seats and apparently oblivious to the tormented rattle of metal under stress, or even to his wife’s description of endless technical details about fuel mixes and delta vees. All that she said meant little to Saul, but was oddly comforting when delivered with that effortless confidence with which she was imbued. Finally, he let his head sink back and closed his eyes, linking once more into one of the few satellite-feeds still transmitting out of Earth orbit.

Much of Brazil had already slid beneath those flickering clouds and disappeared forever. Goodbye, São Paolo, thought Saul with infinite sadness; goodbye Rio de Janeiro, rain forests and macaws. All places and things he’d never set eyes on, but now found himself missing with bottomless remorse.

He discovered a few static-ridden broadcasts still coming out from other parts of the South American continent, and listened to people who knew death was approaching them. He saw a jerky handheld video shot in Venezuela, taken within the hour, that showed black clouds like thunderheads slowly spreading outwards to choke out the sunlight, those familiar twists of light dancing high in the stratosphere.

One by one, the voices faded into the hissing static, never to be heard again, until all that was left was a single audio transmission of a man alternately praying in Spanish and weeping. Saul listened for a few moments before cutting the link, unable to bear any more of it. There was, by contrast, no news coming out of Copernicus whatsoever, and Saul remembered Amy telling him that most if not all of Copernicus’ population had already been evacuated.

‘That’s us officially past the halfway point,’ Amy informed him when Saul opened his eyes again. ‘Less than two days before we touch down.’

‘What about the VASIMRs?’

‘The last of them already touched down. They’ve got a far more efficient burn ratio than an old-style bird like this.’ She glanced round towards him. ‘You know, if you’d told us about your plan to shut down the gates back there before we took off, we might have tried to get you on board one of the VASIMRs instead.’

‘Sorry,’ said Saul. ‘I guess I wasn’t sure if you’d want to take me up, if I told you that first.’

She barked a laugh. ‘You thought maybe we’d just leave you behind? Can’t say the thought mightn’t have crossed my mind, if I thought you were crazy. But I don’t, more’s the pity.’

He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, feeling momentarily dizzy.

Amy’s face had creased in a frown, when he opened his eyes once more. ‘When was the last time you ate?’ she asked.

‘Why?’

‘Amateurs,’ she sighed. ‘You need to eat at regular intervals.’ She placed her hands on the steel bars on either side of her acceleration couch, and levered herself upwards until she floated free. ‘Zero gee screws up your body’s internal signals, makes you think you ain’t hungry when you are. Here.’ She pulled a tinfoil-wrapped package out of a cupboard and pushed it into a microwave oven bolted to one of the bulkheads. It dinged after a couple of seconds, and she retrieved it.

‘I’m not hungry,’ Saul protested, and it was true.

‘Bullshit.’ She unwrapped the tinfoil and pushed the tray of steaming hot food at him. ‘Chicken Surprise.’

Saul sniffed at it. ‘What happened to all that dried food?’

She shrugged. ‘Strictly speaking, that’s for the tourists. Can’t feel like they’re being authentic if they’re eating the decent stuff.’

‘It smells okay,’ he said, regarding the contents doubtfully. ‘Doesn’t look anything like any chicken I’ve ever seen, though.’

‘That’s the surprise,’ she said. ‘Now eat. Can’t save the universe without eating.’

‘I guess.’

Saul felt suddenly ravenous, as if a switch had been thrown somewhere inside of him. He wolfed the contents down, Amy watching him the whole time, a vacuum tube held ready in her hand, but Saul didn’t spill even a drop.

‘Hey, check the board,’ said Lester, loosening his restraints and hauling himself upright, before yawning loudly. ‘We’ve got incoming. Transceiver Two.’

‘You’re kidding,’ said Amy, her eyes becoming unfocused. ‘Hot damn, it’s that girl Olivia.’

Saul stared at them both in shock.

‘All the way from the Jupiter platform?’ said Lester. ‘How the hell did she manage that?’

‘Data looks like it’s been routed through a couple of surviving satellite networks, from what I can see,’ said Amy. ‘Bob’s VASIMR relayed it back to us.’

‘Clever girl,’ said Lester, in a tone of appreciation.

‘It’s addressed to you,’ said Amy, turning to Saul. ‘And it’s marked private,’ she added, raising an eyebrow. ‘Want me to patch it through?’

‘Please,’ Saul replied, and a message received icon appeared before him a few seconds later. ‘Excuse me,’ he added, handing the empty tray back to Amy.

His heart beat wildly inside his chest as he pulled himself back through to the lander. Mitchell looked like he was genuinely asleep, eyes closed and mouth hanging half open in the dimmed light.

Olivia’s message turned out to be a pre-recorded video file. He noticed her eyes were red with fatigue, as she sat at a terminal in what looked like a busy operations room, men and women he didn’t recognize hurrying past or talking together in tight groups behind her.

‘Saul,’ she began, ‘I hope you made it okay. It took me a lot longer than I’d have liked to figure out how to route this to you, so here’s hoping you still get to see it.’

He watched her take a moment to gather herself. ‘Before anything else, I want you to know we’re all fine here. We shut down the Inuvik–Jupiter gate without any major problems, except there just wasn’t enough room for everyone wanting to come through. So we . . .’ She paused for a moment ‘. . . We drew straws, basically. And some of those who stayed behind helped to make sure the wormhole collapsed.’

Saul studied the lines in her face: she looked like she’d aged ten years since he’d last seen her. Then he wondereled himw he would look to her, if she were able to see him. Just as bad, probably.

‘You asked me to find out anything I could about Mitchell,’ she continued. ‘And I’m going to have to tell you now I don’t think it’s good news – assuming you even believe what I’m about to say.’

Here it comes, he thought. His fingers tightened around the hand-grip secured to a bulkhead.

‘You know how I already said you didn’t exactly give me much to go on, except that there’s some link between Mitchell and that shipment? I talked to the others here, Bob Esquivaz and the rest, and told them everything I know. I guess it’s no surprise that there are other people here who’ve had some knowledge of the Founder Network. Some of them have higher clearance than I ever did, which means they can get deeper inside the ASI’s security records than I could. That made things a lot easier than they would have been otherwise.’

She licked her lips, her expression nervous. ‘Assuming the records are correct, we now know the precise time Mitchell recovered consciousness after they brought him back to Earth from Tau Ceti. It’s the exact same moment the plane carrying your missing shipment fell off the radar.’

Saul felt a chill spread through his bones, as he listened intently.

‘Now I don’t know what the hell that means,’ Olivia continued. ‘I can speculate certainly, say that somehow Mitchell’s waking triggered the artefacts inside that shipment into becoming the growths, or maybe it was the other way round and something inside that shipment caused him to wake up.’ She sighed. ‘But if you asked me to go with my gut, after seeing how much he’s changed and knowing what happened to him . . . then I can’t help wondering if that really is him, no matter how much it looks or acts or sounds like him.’

She then went on, Saul listening but not really hearing as she told him their plans for the future. There were three hundred of them on board the Jupiter platform, with stockpiles enough to survive for decades yet, and perhaps even centuries, if their agricultural programme took off.

Saul felt that same bottomless sadness he’d experienced when he’d last spoken to her directly, knowing that if he survived this day then this would be his one remaining memory of her, sitting bleary-eyed and haggard in front of a terminal, while all those strangers hurried past.

She started to finish up, but he stopped the file, unwilling to hear her say goodbye a second time. He saw Mitchell peering at him across the lander, and once again Saul felt a familiar chill settle beneath his skin.

‘I heard the three of you talking through there in the command module,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard from Olivia?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And?’

Mitchell nodded. ‘I’m glad to hear that. Can I see it? The message?’

Saul felt his throat tighten. ‘I’d rather not.’

‘Any reason why?’

‘It’s . . . personal.’

He frowned. ‘Can’t be that personal, surely? I—’ A look of enlightenment crossed his face, and he nodded. ‘Do you know, I actually forgot, for a moment there, about you and Olivia.’

‘You were out of the loop for a couple of years back there. It’s understandable.’

‘You two . . .’ Mitchell traced a loop in the air with the forefinger of one hand. ‘I know you met up while Jeff was still on the run. Did you . . . ?’

‘No, all that was over a long time ago,’ Saul replied, unable to hide a hint of regret.

‘Right,’ Mitchell nodded, ‘if it’s private, it’s private.’

‘Thanks for understanding.’

Saul tried not to show his relief that Mitchell was not being more insistent.

More time passed, the seconds ticking by interminably slowly, and Saul drifted into a kind of reverie. It was a half-awake, half-dreaming state, aided greatly by his feeling of weightlessness. Sometimes he slept, or scanned more of the records from the Tau Ceti base. Instead of feeling bored, his mind was occupied by a kind of unrelenting nervous tension. At one point, Saul re-entered the command module and noticed, through one of the tiny angular windows, how the Moon had expanded enormously. He gazed down on its craters and billion-year-old lava plains.

Lester was now in charge again, while Amy lay curled up on the rear three seats with a pair of large black ear-muffs strapped over her head. She yawned, her eyes flickering open, as Saul floated past her and landed gently in the seat next to Lester.

‘What’s the latest?’ asked Saul.

‘No news.’ Lester shook his head. ‘I’ve been scanning regularly for live feeds, and can’t find a damn one.’

‘You mean everything’s gone?’ Saul felt a spasm of shock. ‘Have the clouds reached Florida yet?’

‘Not yet,’ Lester reassured him. ‘There’s still some patches left untouched, but those damn clouds are scrambling signals all over the place, is my guess. Even if there’s any people left to talk down there, we won’t be able to hear them.’

‘How long before we touch down?’

Lester blinked at the empty air for a couple of seconds. ‘Another four or five hours. I’m calling that a personal best.’

Saul couldn’t contain his surprise. ‘I thought we had at least maybe a day to go?’

‘Depends on how much fuel you burn,’ said Lester, ‘particularly during your initial acceleration. Faster you take off, the faster your escape velocity is, the faster you get to your destination. I forgot to mention that we used most of the fuel we’d normally use for the return trip on take-off, for that added velocity.’ He nodded towards the lander, keeping his voice low. ‘Is Mitchell okay?’

‘Why?’

‘Well, he’s keeping to himself a lot, through there.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘No, not necessarily. But stress affects all kinds of people in all kinds of ways.’

Saul shook his head. ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘My point is, if anyone becomes unbalanced or has some kind of breakdown out here, there isn’t anyone we can turn to for help, and we’ve all got more than enough reasons to lose it right now. I’m not suggesting that’s what’s happening with Mitchell, but when somebody starts hiding away that much, it’s not necessarily a good sign.’

‘No, he’s not crazy,’ Saul replied. ‘At least, no more than I am.’

‘Les?’ interrupted Amy, sitting up and pulling the muffs off. ‘This might not be a good time for you to chat. We’ve got deceleration coming up. I want you and the boys to get yourselves strapped in.’

Lester nodded to her, then returned his attention to Saul, throwing him one last leery glance. ‘Then I hope to hell you’re right,’ he said. ‘Now, get yourself suited up, and I’ll go fetch Mitchell.’

‘Is it absolutely necessary to get suited up?’ Saul protested. ‘We’re not even on the surface yet.’

‘I swear, you’re worse than my damn kids ever were,’ said Lester with a grin. ‘It’s something our insurers have always insisted on.’

‘Not exactly something you need to worry about out here, Lester.’

‘No, but it keeps Amy happy, since you never know what damn thing’s going to go wrong. So suit up and strap yourself in.’

Saul conceded defeat, pulling his suit out from where it was stowed, along with the long johns that helped keep his ody temperature regulated. Lester meanwhile pushed his way through the tunnel leading from the command module to the lander, returning a minute later with Mitchell in tow. Mitchell immediately got into his own suit before returning to the seat directly behind Lester, without comment.

Lester and Amy helped each other put on their suits before conducting more interminable checks on the engines and computer systems. After half an hour, Amy fired the engines. The craft instantly slammed them forward in their seats, as the deceleration burn kicked in, slowing them in their headlong flight, and putting them on target for a lunar insertion. The burn only lasted for thirty seconds but, when it ended, Saul’s lungs ached as he exhaled.

Amy raised one gloved hand up above her head in a thumbs-up, and Saul closed his eyes, listening to the sound of his own breathing, so strangely close and claustrophobic inside his helmet.

The Moon gradually began to fill all of the ports over the next few hours, and Saul spent quite some time peering out at the lunar surface from a vantage point he never thought he’d get the chance to experience. His contacts dropped labels over the Mare Imbrium’s ancient lava flows, similarly highlighting the Copernicus crater lying close by the equator.

Dense ashen clouds had by now covered Canada and much of the Pacific, and had also spread across Washington State like grasping fingers. The Hawaiian Islands had long since disappeared beneath the murk, but a storm front running down the West Coast towards Mexical appeared to be holding the clouds back in the south. Florida remained unaffected, but Saul knew, with grim certainty, that wouldn’t be the case for much longer. More clouds were meanwhile spreading north across the Gulf of Mexico.

‘We’re going to all move through to the lander now,’ Amy announced, ‘Then we’ll separate the modules before all heading down to the surface in the lander. We’ll be doing a fair bit of walking across the lunar surface once we land, so I want you all to run more checks on your suits. Access your how-tos and follow the instructions.’

‘Speaking of which,’ said Lester, ‘separation due in fifteen minutes, and counting.’

They moved through into the lander, one by one, securing themselves into the padded chairs there as Lester sealed off the hatch. He then made a series of further checks, along with Amy, flipping rows of toggles before strapping in with just a few seconds to go.

Thirty seconds passed, and the lander jerked violently. At the same moment, Saul heard a dull thump, like an executioner’s blade biting into wood.

‘And that, lady and gentlemen,’ declared Lester, ‘is what we call a separation.’

‘What now?’ asked Saul, his skin already coated with cold sweat.

‘What’s now is that we land,’ replied Amy in a distracted tone. ‘So try not to interrupt your flight crew, okay?’

Saul mumban apology, and noticed Mitchell’s eyes were closed under the curved plastic of his helmet. Behind their lids, his pupils darted constantly here and there, his lips twitching.

Saul used his contacts to watch the lunar surface slip by beneath them. Before long it became clear that they were dropping lower and lower, the craft oriented so it was flying upside-down in respect to the surface. More time passed until the nearest edge of Copernicus itself crept into sight, growing wider and deeper as they descended towards the low hills beyond the crater’s rim.

‘Tight,’ muttered Amy. ‘Look at that. Not much flat ground round here. Shoulda stuck to our usual designated landing zone.’

‘Doing fine, hon,’ said Lester, his tone calm and reassuring. ‘Just guide her in best you can.’

The craft twisted around in its flight until it was oriented the right way. They dropped yet lower over the next several minutes, until thick plumes of grey dust billowed up around the lander, obscuring the view through the external cameras. Almost before he realized it, the lander had touched down with a gentle thump.

Saul let out a shaky breath. I’m alive, he thought.

‘That was a sweet landing, honey,’ said Lester, turning to her with a look of approval. ‘Why, I—’

Saul saw the back of Lester’s helmet shatter under a blow from the wrench gripped in one of Mitchell’s gloved hands. Lester exhaled sharply and reached out with one hand to the control panel before him. Another blow followed immediately, smashing through the ruins of his helmet to strike the back of his skull with sickening force.

Saul scrabbled at his restraints, then raised one arm in a feeble attempt at defending himself, just as Mitchell aimed the next blow at him. Saul’s helmet fractured under the impact, but still held together.

Mitchell leaned over him, his face filled with a snarl. Out of the corner of his eye, Saul could see Amy unbuckling herself, before bending forward to reach under her seat.

Mitchell pulled the wrench back for a second swing, but the module was too cramped and the weapon slammed into a control panel behind him, tumbling from his grasp. Saul tore frantically at his restraints while, swearing under his breath, Mitchell crouched down to find the wrench.

Amy stood up from her seat just as Saul managed to fight loose of his restraints. She gripped a weapon of her own in both hands. At first glance it looked like a regular shotgun, but with a peculiarly home-made appearance, as if it had been assembled from random pieces of junk.

Before Saul had time to wonder what the Roses were doing with a shotgun hidden on the lander, Amy fired it at Mitchell from point-blank range.

It took some moments for Saul to register what happened next. Mitchell had shifted to one side with startling, inhuman speed, the bullet smacking into a compumounted on the bulkhead behind him. It was as if someone had inserted a jump-cut into reality: first Mitchell had been here, but now he was there.

Saul already knew from the how-tos how easily the bullet could have punctured the lander’s thin walls.

Amy swore and tried to take aim a second time, and Saul noticed how the trigger mechanism was roomy enough for a spacesuit-gloved finger to fit around it.

Mitchell leaned over Lester’s prone form to snatch the weapon away from her, moving once again with that shocking fluid velocity.

Saul then remembered what Donohue had said. He’s not even human.

He grabbed hold of Mitchell from the side, only for the man to swing Amy’s rifle around like a club, slamming the stock into Saul’s ribs and sending him stumbling backwards. By the time Saul had struggled half upright again, Mitchell was swinging the rifle back and forth between him and Amy. The lander felt more intensely cramped and claustrophobic than ever.

‘I don’t want either of you getting in the way,’ Mitchell shouted. ‘Amy, I—’

The interior of the lander was so tiny that, when Mitchell glanced towards Amy, it was easy for Saul to reach out with one gloved fist and knock the rifle barrel upward, so that it smacked into a control panel mounted on the ceiling. Saul pushed his advantage by grabbing hold of the barrel, struggling desperately to pull it from Mitchell’s grasp. Mitchell was sweating inside his suit, with an expression suggesting he was in considerable discomfort. As his eyes became unfocused, Saul felt the man’s grip on the weapon begin to loosen.

‘Now you listen, you piece of shit,’ Saul barked, ‘you’re going to—’

A sound like a hammer blow filled the tiny cabin, and a nearly irresistible force almost lifted Saul into the air.

He slammed shoulder-first into one of the forward control panels, hard enough to leave him feeling dazed. He caught a glimpse of lunar regolith, down between the lander’s legs, then realized the forward hatch had somehow been blown, the air inside the craft explosively decompressing. Mitchell pushed Amy out of the way and literally dived head-first through the narrow hatch, before landing between the lander’s legs, in a great cloud of dust.

‘Don’t move,’ he heard Amy warning him over the A/V. ‘Your helmet’s cracked. I need to resecure that hatch before we can do anything else.’

‘What the hell just happened?’

Amy reached down for a handle attached to one side of the hatch. ‘Give me a hand here,’ she ordered.

Saul took hold of the handle on the opposite side, and held it in place, following her clipped directions as she reset the locking mechanism. He had to lean over Lester to do s and noticed his unmoving eyes staring off through one of the lander’s triangular windows.

‘I don’t know how he figured out how to do that,’ Amy muttered tightly, ‘but he triggered the emergency release.’

Saul remembered studying Mitchell when he had assumed he might be asleep, and seeing the man’s eyes dart back and forth under their lids, no doubt planning and preparing, while searching out flaws in the lander’s UP-linked control systems.

‘I think I might know,’ he admitted.

Once Amy had finished resecuring the hatch, she reached out and flipped a couple of switches on a control panel, then did the same with a virtual panel floating to one side. A distant hiss quickly built to a roar as the cabin filled up with air once more, from an emergency tank.

‘How he did it doesn’t matter right now,’ said Amy. ‘Well, that’s us repressurized. Now we’ve got to help Lester.’

‘Amy . . .’

She ignored him, pulling open a steel cabinet and withdrawing a large white plastic box. ‘Medical kit,’ she explained. ‘We’ll need to dress that wound.’

Saul gazed down at Lester’s slumped form, with a feeling of hopelessness, as Amy hurriedly pulled off her helmet and dropped it to one side.

Saul pulled off his own damaged helmet too, then helped her remove Lester’s. Tears trickled down her cheeks, as she murmured Lester’s name over and over again, like a litany. Lester’s head rolled to one side, his jaw slack and his eyes vacant.

‘Amy, please, listen to me.’

She began weeping in earnest. ‘We can get him to a hospital in Copernicus,’ she insisted. ‘Someone might still be there, someone who can . . .’

Saul stared down at Lester’s lifeless features. ‘It’s too late for that.’

Amy sniffed and reached up to pinch away the tears gathering around her eyes. She stood up abruptly, the medical kit slipping from her grasp. ‘I don’t understand . . . why did he do this? He tried to kill you, too.’

‘I don’t know,’ Saul replied, reaching out with two gloved fingers to close Lester’s eyes.

Amy kneeled on her seat, her face twisted in anguish, as she stared down at her husband. ‘Listen to me, Saul,’ she said eventually, her voice hoarse. ‘There are some auxiliary suits.’

‘There are?’ Saul felt a sudden stab of hope.

Amy nodded listlessly and touched one gloved hand to Lester’s cheek. ‘ou can get yourself another helmet belonging to one of them.’ She took a deep, shuddering breath, and then stood up as straight as possible. Her eyes, blazing with anger, met Saul’s. ‘I want you to kill him, do you hear me?’

‘Amy . . .’

‘No, dammit, I want him dead.’

Saul tried to think of something to say. ‘I need to find out why he did this, and if I kill him, I can’t do that.’

Her gloved fists clenched themselves by her sides. She might be an old woman now, but Saul suddenly saw just how very formidable she must have been in her youth.

‘Then make damn sure he never gets as far as the colonies,’ she hissed in a half-whisper.

The spare suits were located in a locker hidden beneath a floor panel at the rear. Amy helped him pull out a new helmet.

‘Now listen up,’ she said. ‘We’ve landed a couple of klicks south-east of the Lunar Array. Any normal day, we’d wind up in jail for flying anywhere near this close to it.’ She retrieved the rifle from where she’d propped it against a bulkhead. ‘Here, you’re going to need this thing when you go after Mitchell.’

Saul searched her eyes as he took it from her. ‘Why in God’s name would you need something like this on board a tourist craft?’ he asked. ‘You could have blown a hole in the lander and killed all of us, not just Mitchell.’

‘It’s an insurance policy.’

‘Insurance against what?’

An uncomfortable look crossed her face. ‘Against getting caught.’

‘You were smuggling, is that it?’

‘Not necessarily in this bird. In the VASIMRs, mostly. Things got tight a few years back, and we were on the verge of going under. This way, we can slip all kinds of stuff past customs and fly it straight back home without going anywhere near Florida. People, sometimes, too.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess telling you this doesn’t matter now.’

‘So what were you planning on doing, if you got caught? Have a shoot-out with the ASI?’

Amy made a sound of irritation. ‘Officials we can pay off, but we had competitors – sometimes very vicious ones. We thought they might plant someone on board, a ringer of some kind, so . . .’ She gestured at the rifle. ‘You should realize that thing’s designed to work in a vacuum.’

Saul nodded. He rather suspected that the rifle, when disassembled, might look, to the casual eye, like nothing more than random components of normal onboard equipment.

She squinted at him. ‘You’d figured this out already, hadn’t you?’

‘I had a feeling, yes.’ He lifted up the helmet and paused before sliding it on. ‘You’d better put on your own helmet, if we’re going.’

She laughed. ‘You’re kidding, right? I’d only slow you down.’

‘You need to get to the city, Amy. Your friends will be waiting for you.’

She nodded slowly, with a look of desperate sadness in her eyes that Saul recognized. It was the same way he himself had looked on the day the Galileo wormhole had collapsed.

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I need to stay here with Lester. Just for a little while longer.’

‘Amy . . .’

‘No.’ Her expression was stony. ‘Go find him now, before he gets away.’