‘Twenty-nine minutes!’
The mini-nuke lay there between them on the asphalt, a squat, malevolent box. The timecode ticked down mercilessly, a countdown to the end of creation, bringing a new Big Bang.
‘Stop!’ Palmer shouted, holding up both hands. ‘Everybody just shut up! Nobody’s disarming a damn thing round here. Get it over to the landing field. We have to get rid of it.’
‘We’ll never manage it,’ DeLucas said. ‘How do you intend to—’
Palmer switched over to the shuttle frequency.
‘Io? Callisto? Leland Palmer here, can you hear me?’
‘Kyra here. What’s up, Leland?’
‘We found the darn thing! It’s going to blow in twenty-eight minutes, excuse me, twenty-seven. I need one of you back here, right now!’
‘All right,’ Gore said. ‘We’re turning round.’
‘We’re nearer,’ Nina said.
‘What? But you have to—’
‘There!’ called Jagellovsk.
DeLucas held her breath. Callisto broke free against the backdrop of the stars, curved about and dropped down towards the base.
‘I’m coming in to land,’ said Nina.
‘Over to Igloo 1!’ Palmer shouted. He leapt and danced like a dervish, waving his arms. ‘Igloo 1, you hear me? We’re outside! Get the bomb on board and then dump it as far away as you can, in some goddam crater!’
Callisto
‘I see them,’ Nina said.
Julian bent down. ‘Once we’ve got the thing on board—’
‘Once I’ve got the thing on board.’ She turned her head and looked at him. ‘You’re getting out.’
‘What? Out of the question!’
‘You are.’
‘We’re flying together—’
‘You’re all getting out,’ she said, with an air of quiet command. ‘You too, Julian.’
And then there it was.
For one deeply satisfying moment she saw fear in Julian’s eyes. For just an instant, but an instant that would be with her for ever, she saw at last what she knew she had earned, knew that she deserved from him, that she’d never asked for, in all the time by his side. He wasn’t afraid for his guests, or his precious daughter, or for his hotel. He was afraid only for her, afraid that she might be hurt. Fearful of the hole she would leave in his life if she died, the hole in his heart.
She slowed, and let the shuttle sink down.
Down below, the astronauts were scurrying about and waving to her. She choked back on the thrust. The bulldozed patch down here was relatively small, full of vehicles and machinery. Carefully, she guided Callisto over to a spot near the igloo that offered just enough room for her to land, then settled with a bump, extended the airlock and turned around to her passengers.
‘Everybody out!’ she shouted, clapping her hands. ‘Then bring the damn bomb in here. Quick!’
She looked at Julian. He hesitated. The storm-clouds cleared on his face and she saw a beam of honest-to-goodness affection break through like the sun, and all of a sudden he was hugging her to himself, and gave her a scratchy kiss.
‘Take care of yourself,’ he whispered.
‘You won’t get rid of me that easily.’ She smiled. ‘Watch out for the engines when you get out. Don’t let them wander about under the thrusters.’
He nodded, slid from his chair and hurried to catch up with the others. Nina turned back to the controls. The lift control showed her that the group was going down to the ground. She watched through the cockpit window as an astronaut hurried across carrying something about the size of a suitcase in both hands. The figure disappeared under Callisto’s belly, and then she heard Palmer’s voice.
‘It’s in!’
‘Got you.’
‘Get going then! Twenty minutes to go! Get the thing away from us!’
‘You can say that again,’ she murmured, revving. She brought the shuttle up a few metres even as the airlock was retracting, and turned. A shudder ran through Callisto.
‘What happened?’ she called.
‘You struck the lock against one of the hangars here,’ Julian said. ‘Just brushed the roof.’
Nina cursed, and lifted higher. She glanced around for any error message.
‘Is it still retracting?’
‘Yes! Seems fine.’
The controls showed that the lock was fully inside Callisto. Nina climbed to three hundred metres, then accelerated faster than she would ever have dared with passengers on board. The thrust pushed her back into her seat as Callisto shot off at more than twelve hundred kilometres per hour. The base dropped away out of sight. Cliffs, chasms and plateaux flew past below like a time-lapse landscape. She would have to make for lower ground as soon as she could, but the stark mountains below seemed to climb and climb for ever where the edges of Peary Crater fused into Hermite to the west. Range reared up after range, ridges and plateaux marched on endlessly, but then at last she saw a ragged abyss yawn wide.
The bowl of Hermite Crater.
Still too close.
Even if the mountain ranges protected the base from the blast itself, there was no telling where the debris would rain down. Nina called up a polar map on her holographic display and looked for a suitable spot. The question was how far she could make the time left to her stretch out. If she waited too long to chuck the mini-nuke overboard, she was in danger of being caught in the nuclear furnace herself, but she didn’t want to dump it out of the airlock too soon. The shadows of a sunlit plain rushed past below her, sown with impact craters from smaller meteorites. Flying as low as she was, she had lost radio contact with everyone. According to the dashboard clock she had been flying for eight minutes, and she still wasn’t past the whole of Hermite. She could see the crater’s western wall looming in the distance, a vast, curving cliff, growing fast, growing closer.
Twelve minutes left.
She looked back at her map. Further to the south-west was a smaller crater, in deep shadow, which suggested that it must be fairly deep. She asked the computer for more information, and a text field unrolled on top of the hologram.
Sylvester Crater, she read. 58 kilometres in diameter.
Depth: unknown.
She liked the look of it. It looked almost tailor-made to swallow the energy of a nuclear bomb, and all of a sudden she had to smile. Sylvester, how appropriate. A crater named for the father of industrial explosives, and it would see the biggest damn explosion the Moon had known for thousands of years. Grinning, she changed course a few degrees south-west, and Callisto tore over Hermit’s western rim.
Eleven minutes.
The crater wall fell away beneath her, rugged, pocked by lesser impacts, and gave way to a broad, flat valley. The other side of the valley had to be Sylvester’s outer wall. Nina leapt from the pilot’s seat and ran to the airlock, suddenly scared that Palmer might have misread the timecode, but when she peered through the pane she saw the mini-nuke sitting on the cabin floor, its counter just ticking down from the ten-minute mark.
The sight of the bomb made her suddenly queasy.
09.57
09.56
09.55
Time to throw in her hand; she’d pushed her luck as far as she could. There was enough distance now between the bomb and the base. She ran back to the cockpit and gave the command to extend the airlock.
The computer gave her an error report.
Incredulous, she stared at the console. Suddenly the lift symbol was blinking, fiery red. She tried again to extend the shaft, but without success.
Impossible. Just impossible!
She demanded a report.
Airlock not fully drawn up, it said. Please draw up lock before attempting to extend.
Her legs trembled wildly. Hastily she ordered the shaft to draw up, even though it was already drawn up – at least, it had seemed that way, but perhaps there was a centimetre or so still to go. But the display didn’t stop blinking.
Airlock cannot be drawn up.
/> Cannot be drawn up?
Nine minutes.
Less than nine.
‘Are you crazy?’ she shouted at the control system. ‘Draw up, extend! How the hell am I supposed to—’
She stopped. You had to be completely crazy yourself to try arguing with a computer. The airlock wouldn’t open, and that was that. Which meant that she couldn’t just spit the bomb out that way, and she couldn’t fetch it from the lock to throw it out of the rear hatch.
The rear hatch!
Her heart pounding, she raced to the stern, opened the bulkhead to the cargo hold, charged inside and looked around. There were a few grasshoppers here, hanging in their brackets and ready to roam. It had hardly been eighteen hours since they had been using them to tour the legendary Apollo landing site. She loosened the clips on one of them, stood it up on its telescopic legs and checked the fuel tank. Enough. All right then, back to the bridge, but as she drew level with the airlock she couldn’t resist glancing inside. She hesitated, then looked in at the infernal device, saw the timecode running down—
06.44
06.43
– she tore herself away. Dashed into the cockpit.
Looked out.
Sylvester’s crater wall, still a good way off but growing larger every moment. She had to make sure that the bomb would explode on the crater floor, deep inside. Otherwise she would be dead for sure. Her fingers leapt across the instrument panel like a virtuoso at the keyboard as she calculated the angle of approach she would need for a controlled crash, and the shuttle’s nose dipped – no, that was too much, less! – there, that was it. A steady descent.
And now, out of here. Helmet on.
Her hands were trembling. Why were her hands trembling, now of all times?
05.59
The helmet wouldn’t fit.
05.58
She had left it too late.
05.57
05.56
Now!
Cargo hold. Manual controls.
The loading hatch sank down, infuriatingly slowly, to reveal the stars and, far off, the Peary–Hermite range. Nina climbed up onto the grasshopper platform and kicked the thing up into the air, just a little. The hatch yawned wider. A hair’s breadth was all she needed. Without waiting for it to open entirely, she steered the hopper along the cargo hold and through the shuttle’s rear hatch as it tore down towards the ground.
It would be an illusion to think that she was safe now. The shuttle seemed to be standing still relative to her speed, which meant that she was still hurtling towards Sylvester at 1200 kilometres per hour on her tiny craft, just as fast as Callisto itself. Realistically, her chances were just about as bad as could be, though she still had five minutes to achieve the impossible, maybe four. Somewhere between 250 and 300 seconds, at any rate. All her hopes hung on having calculated the proper angle of impact for the shuttle. She swung her nozzles to the horizontal and opened the throttle for as much thrust as the little machine could muster.
The hopper bucked and tried to throw her off.
Then it rushed for all its engines were worth away from Callisto, bravely doing its best against the murderous acceleration, and losing height all the while. The shuttle dwindled away rapidly in front of Nina’s eyes. She swung the nozzles around a little further and went down to the ground, too close to the ground, as she established the next moment, since she was still going much too fast. She was in danger of being smashed to pieces, and she steered the hopper up again, wringing the last drop of thrust out of its jets, and saw Callisto speeding towards Sylvester’s sunlit slopes. The dusty lunar surface was not racing past quite so fast beneath her now, the hopper was battling against its own momentum and winning. It was slowing down, but would there be time to slow it to a safe landing speed?
And if she could? How much time did she still have?
Two minutes?
One?
A small crater rushed towards her, zipped by below and then was lost to sight. An ideal spot to take shelter. Somehow she had to make her way back to the crater, but she was still travelling at considerable speed. Over on the horizon, Callisto hung above the sweeping wall of mountains, a gleaming point, so close to the rim that for a moment she was afraid that she had miscalculated and the shuttle would smash into the crater wall, that the bomb would explode there on the slopes, and that nothing would protect her from the fury of the blast.
Then the shining dot disappeared inside Sylvester, and she gave a victory whoop, since she’d won this point at least in the deadly game. Still whooping, she steered the hopper down, fought against her own headlong hurtle, and gradually, little by little, the contraption seemed to be bleeding off the speed that the shuttle had given it, even if it was still going too fast to land. She could forget about that little crater by now, it was already much too far behind her, but something about the same size sped towards her, maybe a little smaller. The ring wall was two, perhaps three kilometres across but it was astonishingly high, so that all of a sudden she was afraid that the hopper wouldn’t make it over the peaks, would crash. Just before impact, she yanked the machine upwards, scraping over the rim, and then looked down. The crater wall cast a threatening shadow into the cauldron, a curve of blackness like a scythe. She slowed further, flew over the opposite wall, then she could see the plain again and Sylvester, its peaks terrifyingly near, unsoftened by atmospheric haze.
There was something happening there.
Hildegaard narrowed her eyes.
The sky above Sylvester blazed.
She held her breath.
From one moment to the next, the stars were swallowed up by a smear of blazing light as though a second sun were being born inside the crater. Instantly, she turned her eyes away, flew a 180-degree curve and realised that she now had full control of speed and direction. Her second little crater was some distance off by now, but the ground below was no longer hurtling past. She had won the battle against her acceleration and now she had to find shelter. All around, the slopes and cliffs, even the distant polar massif, were glowing in the light of the nuclear explosion, but that died away so suddenly that she couldn’t resist her curiosity. She turned the hopper.
The light had vanished.
For a moment she thought that Sylvester had absorbed the energy of an entire nuclear explosion, but something was different now. At first she couldn’t understand what she was seeing, but then the shock of recognition hit.
The ridge of the crater wall had vanished.
No, not vanished. It was hidden by a screen of dust that shrouded the upper slopes and fountained skywards, swallowing the stars, a plume many kilometres high, growing higher and higher, unreal, bizarre, a nightmare image—
Crawling down the slopes.
Crawling?
‘Oh shit,’ whispered Nina.
All of a sudden, the wall of dust had become a huge wave, spilling over the crater wall in all directions and racing down towards the plain. Nina had no idea just how fast it was travelling, but it was certainly coming ten times faster than her little hopper could fly, twenty times, thirty. For a moment she was paralysed, not able even to tear her eyes away, then she yanked the machine around and thrashed it back towards the nameless little crater. After the breakneck ride out of Callisto, it was as though the hopper was just creeping along. She risked another look. Sylvester had vanished completely. There was only the dust racing towards her, swallowing the sky and devouring all before it.
Faster. Faster!
The crater wall, her only hope of shelter!
Desperately, she yanked the grasshopper upwards, and it hauled itself up the slope as though worn out by the excitement of the past few minutes. Its telescopic legs scrabbled across the rocks and it tottered from side to side, then with one leap it was over the ridge. Nina spread her arms and leapt from the platform. Her body slammed into the steep regolith and then she was rolling down, over a sudden edge. She fell in a long arc and landed quite a way further off, in the shadow of a sheer cliff-fac
e. From the corner of her eyes she could see the grasshopper tumbling end over end. She braced her feet in the scree slope and managed to stop her downward slide. She crawled into the shelter of an overhang and curled up into a ball.
Above her, the sky grew dark.
In the next moment, everything was grey. A hail of pebbles, tiny stones, pattered down into the crater’s bowl. Nina cowered as small as she could, protected against the pressure wave and the rubble by her overhang, but the rocks falling in front of her sent up a spray of regolith in turn. She crossed her arms in front of her helmet for protection and hoped that the suit would hold up to the onslaught. She could see nothing at all, merely a thick grey cloud on a grey ground, and she shut her eyes.
The wall raced past her.
* * *
She had no idea how long she had been lying there. When she finally dared take her arms from her faceplate, the impacts had stopped and a hazy, shifting cloud of dust hung everywhere.
She clambered to her feet and stretched her limbs. She could hardly believe that she was still alive. That nothing had broken. Apparently, she was totally unharmed.
She had survived an atom bomb.
On the other hand, she was now stuck in a nameless crater miles from Peary with no means of getting away. Her own little crater, that had saved her life. She had an intact spacesuit, her radio and enough oxygen for the next few hours until Io found her. At least, she hoped that they’d be looking for her and hadn’t simply assumed that her death was inevitable.
First of all, she decided, she had to get out of this crater. Better for the radio reception once Io turned up.
Resigned, she set out on the long climb.
London, Great Britain
I’m sorry about this, Yoyo—
Whatever else Xin said after that reached her as mere wordsound, a voiceprint only, since at that moment her overloaded nerves gave way. The nervus vagus, that had survived so many lesser crises before now, simply stopped all regulatory function and left the organs under its command to their own devices, plunging them into chaos. Without higher functions to command them, arteries let the blood rush unhindered to her legs, her heart found nothing to pump, her brain waited in vain for the oxygen to arrive and Xin’s next words were nothing more than a half-heard electrochemical impulse. ‘You lose.’ Maybe he said them, maybe he didn’t. At that moment, all systems shut down. Her eyes turned up, and she slumped. Shot down by a bullet that never hit her.