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.
Translunar Space, 10 February 2235
Sa
ul 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?’