Ark

45

Thandie Jones stood in the control room at Pikes Peak, surrounded by a scene she’d thought she’d never see again, a scene she’d thought lost with so much else of the pre-flood world: a launch control, rows of earnest technicians murmuring into comms links as they monitored the progress of a spacecraft rising from the Earth.

But what a spacecraft.

Gordo touched her shoulder. “Look. We got some image capture from before the first detonation.” The images had been taken from a camera directly beneath the pusher plate. “See that?” Gordo pointed, intent. “That puff of steam is the injection of the charge. There’s the pulse unit itself…” A vase-shaped object falling down into the air, from a hole in the great metal roof above it. “The anti-ablation oil sprays over the pusher. And- bang — the detonation of the bomb itself.” The sequence ended as the camera was fried.

Thandie had first worked with Gordo Alonzo twenty-four years ago, when they had gone diving together in a museum-piece submarine, seeking evidence of subterranean seas. Now, having forced her way back to his attention over the issue of Grace Gray, he’d invited her to come here to watch the climax of the project. She would never have dreamed that after all these years she and Gordo would be standing side by side in a situation like this. She’d never even liked the man.

There were gasps as images from an aircraft just outside the blast zone were fed to the screens. Thandie turned to see.

A crater, kilometers wide, had been burned into the Earth. Above it rose the familiar sight of a nuclear fireball, a mushroom cloud. But a spacecraft contrail punched astonishingly up and out of that cloud, powered by more detonations, more fireballs, a string of them. Soon the plasma glare from the rising craft outshone the atomic glow on the ground, and cast light across the remnant of the land and the encroaching sea, a lethal sun rising.

“What did I start, Gordo? Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut.”

He grunted. “You always did take all the credit, you ballsy dyke.”