Limit

Aristarchus Plateau, The Moon

The space shuttle Ganymede was a Hornet-model flying machine, with ion propulsion and pivotable jets to achieve thrust in any desired direction. In outward appearance it resembled a grotesquely swollen transport helicopter, Eurocopter HTH class without rotors, but sitting on short, fat legs; inside it offered the comfort of a private jet. All thirty-six seats could be turned into couches at the press of a button, each seat had its own multimedia console. There was a tiny, extravagantly equipped galley which lacked only alcohol, in line with the regulation that crews must not dull their senses in the course of the day.

At present Gaia had two Hornet shuttles, the Ganymede and the Callisto. That afternoon they were both hurtling through the vacuum, more than 1400 kilometres apart: Callisto heading towards Rupes Recta, a colossal fault in the middle of the Mare Nubium, 250 metres deep and so long that you had a sense that it circled the whole of the Moon; Ganymede flying straight towards the Aristarchus Plateau, an archipelago of craters in the middle of the Ocean of Storms. A few hours previously the Callisto, flown by Nina Hedegaard and carrying the Ögis, Nairs, Donoghues and Finn, had visited the Descartes Highlands, where the landing stage of Apollo 16 dozed in the sun and a derelict moon-car exuded a nostalgic charm, while Ganymede had borne down upon the crater of Copernicus. From the lofty heights of its outer ring, the travellers had admired its rough central range, they had penetrated its capacious interior and shuddered to think what sort of giant must have fallen from the sky here 800 million years ago.

The world was nothing but stone, and yet it was so much more.

The soft, undulating structure of its plains led you to forget that the maria were not true seas, nor the crater bottoms lakes. Curious structures suggested former habitation, as if H. G. Wells’ space-travelling heroes had actually encountered insect-oid selenites and herds of moon-cows here, before being abducted into the machine world of the lunar underground. They had seen a lot that day, Carl Hanna, Marc Edwards and Mimi Parker, Amber and the Locatellis, Evelyn Chambers and Oleg Rogachev, whose wife lay grimly by the moon pool, but Julian insisted that the highlight was still to come. The first spurs of the high plateau appeared in the north-west. Peter Black made the shuttle climb high above the Aristarchus Crater, which looked as if it was cast out of light.

‘The Arena of the Spirits,’ Julian whispered with an air of mystery, a youthful grin playing around the corners of his mouth. ‘An observation point for sinister light phenomena. Some people are convinced that Aristarchus is inhabited by demons.’

‘Interesting,’ said Evelyn Chambers. ‘Perhaps we should leave Momoka here for a while.’

‘That would be the end of any sinister phenomena,’ Momoka observed drily. ‘After only an hour in my company the last demon would have emigrated to Mars.’

Locatelli raised his eyebrows, full of admiration at how coquettishly his wife was twisting and turning in the mirror of her own self-criticism.

‘And can you tell us something about the cause?’ Rogachev asked.

‘Yeah, well, there are a lot of arguments about that. For decades light phenomena have been witnessed in Aristarchus and other craters, but until a few years ago ultra-orthodox astronomers refused even to acknowledge the existence of such “Lunar Transient Phenomena”.’

‘Perhaps volcanoes?’ Hanna suggested.

‘Wilhelm Herschel, an astronomer of the late eighteenth century, was convinced of that. Very popular in his day. He was one of the first to spot red dots in the lunar night, some of them around here. Herschel supposed they were glowing lava. Later his sightings were confirmed, other observers reported a violet haze, menacingly dark clouds, lightning, flames and sparks, all extremely mysterious.’

‘To spit lava, the Moon would have to have a liquid core,’ said Amber. ‘Does it?’

‘You see, that’s the rub.’ Julian smiled. ‘It’s generally assumed that it does, but so deep underground that volcanic eruptions are ruled out as an explanation.’

Momoka peered suspiciously out of the side windows into Aristarchus’ gaping mouth.

‘You can stop trying to make things so exciting,’ Evelyn said after a while.

‘Wouldn’t you rather believe in demons?’

‘I don’t see demons as romantic,’ said Parker. ‘It would mean the Devil living on the Moon.’

‘So?’ Locatelli shrugged. ‘Sooner here than in California.’

‘So the Devil is someone you make jokes about.’

‘Fine.’ Julian raised his hands. ‘There is a bit of volcanic activity up here. No lava streams, admittedly, but it’s been noted that the phenomena always occur when the Moon is closest to the Earth, so when gravity is tugging at it particularly hard. The consequences are lunar quakes. When that happens, pores and cracks appear, hot gases emerge from the deeper regions to the surface, bursting out at high pressure, regolith is fired out, albedo accumulates at the exit point, and already you have a glowing cloud.’

‘I get it,’ said Momoka. ‘It needs to fart.’

‘You should stop giving away all the tricks,’ Amber said with a sideways glance at Parker. ‘I thought the demons were more exciting.’

‘And what’s that thing there?’ Edwards narrowed his eyes and pointed outside. Something massive was twisting its way north-west of the crater, across the plateau with all its furrows and potholes. It looked like a huge snake, or rather like the cast for a snake, a beast of mythical proportions. The funnel-shaped head joined a twisting body that narrowed until it opened up, thin and pointed, in the next plain along. The whole thing looked as if it had once been the resting-place of Ananden, the ancient Indian world snake that carried the earth and the universe, the scaly, breathing throne of the god Vishnu.

‘That,’ said Julian, ‘is Schröter’s Valley.’

Black soared above the formation at great height, so that they could admire its vast dimensions, the whole of the great Moon valley, as Julian explained, four billion years old; and other people had in fact been struck by its serpentine nature. The head crater, six kilometres across, was called Cobra’s Head, a cobra that twisted 168 kilometres to the shore of the Oceanus Procellarum. On a plateau that overlooked Cobra’s Head from the north-east, a levelled area came into view, lined with hangars and collectors. A radio mast gleamed in the sunlight. Black brought the vehicle down towards the landing field and set Ganymede down gently on its beetle legs.

‘Schröter space station,’ he said, and grinned conspiratorially at Julian. ‘Welcome to the Realm of the Spirits. The chances of us seeing any are slight, and yet, ladies and gentlemen, stay away from suspicious-looking holes and cracks. Helmets and armour on. Five in the lock at any one time, like this morning. Julian, Amber, Carl, Oleg and Evelyn first, followed by Marc, Mimi, Warren, Momoka and me. If I may ask you.’

Unlike the landing module of the Charon, in a Hornet shuttle you didn’t have to suck out all the air in the cabin, but left it via a lift that doubled as an airlock. Black extended the shaft. They took their chest armour from the shelf and helped each other into their tightly fitting suits, while Julian tried to banish the shadow that stripped his mood of its usual radiant power. Lynn was starting to change, he couldn’t deny it. She was showing signs of inner seclusion, had developed unattractive rings around her eyes and was treating him with growing and unprovoked aggression. In his puzzlement he had confided in Hanna – a mistake, perhaps, although he couldn’t say exactly why. The Canadian was fine, in fact. And yet he had recently started feeling slightly shy around Hanna, as if he would only have to look a bit more closely, and unsettling trigonometric connections would appear between him, Lynn and the ghostly train. The longer he brooded about it, the more certain he was that the solution was right before his eyes. He saw the truth without recognising it. A detail of banal validity, but as long as his inner projectionist slept the sleep of the just, he couldn’t reach it.

Along with the others, he entered the lock and put his helmet on. Through the viewing windows he could see the interior of the shuttle, while the air was being sucked out of the lock. He saw Locatelli delivering speeches, Momoka helping Parker into the survival backpack, then the lift cabin plummeted, emerged from the belly of the Ganymede and travelled down the shaft to just above the asphalt of the landing field. A ramp emerged from the floor of the cabin and they stepped outside along it. It had not been planned for shuttles to land on anything but solid surfaces, but if such a landing were necessary, any contact between the cabin and the fine dust of the regolith was to be kept to a minimum, because otherwise—

Julian hesitated.

All of a sudden it was as if the projectionist had rubbed his eyes. Yawning, he pulled himself together to climb down into the archive and look for the missing roll of film.

He had just seen it again: the truth.

And again he hadn’t understood it.

He watched with irritation as the second group left the lock. Black waved them over to one of the cylindrical hangars. Three open rovers were parked in it, surprisingly like historical moon-cars, but with three axles, bigger wheels and room for six people in each. The improved design of the rover, Black explained, made it faster than in the early years of lunar car manufacture, and also fit to drive on extremely uneven ground. Each of the wheel mountings could swing if necessary to a ninety-degree vertical, which was enough to let it simply drive over large boulders.

‘But not on the path that we’re about to take,’ he added. ‘We’re following the northern stretch of the valley until the first turning of the cobra’s body. A rocky outcrop there, the spur of the Rupes Toscanelli scarp, runs right up to the edge of the gorge, Snake Hill. I’ll tell you no more than that for the time being.’

‘And how far are we going?’ Locatelli wanted to know.

‘Not far. Just eight kilometres, but the journey is spectacular, right along the edge of the Vallis.’

‘Can I drive?’ Locatelli was jumping around with excitement. ‘I really want to drive that thing!’

‘Of course.’ Black laughed. ‘The steering is easy, it’s the same as the buggies. You shouldn’t drive straight at the biggest obstacles, if you don’t want to go flying out of your seat, but otherwise—’

‘Of course not,’ said Locatelli, already imagining his foot on the accelerator.

‘Will we let him have his fun?’ Julian said to Momoka.

‘Of course. As long as you let me have the fun of driving in the other rover.’

‘Good. Warren is driving rover number two, and promises to bring Carl, Mimi and Marc safely to their destination, the rest of us will take the first one. Who’s the chauffeur?’

When everyone said they wanted to be the chauffeur, the choice fell on Amber. She was told how the various functions worked, took a test drive and got everything right straight away.

‘I want one of these when we’re back down there,’ she cried.

‘You don’t,’ Julian grinned. ‘It’s six times as heavy down there. It would fall to bits in the garage.’

The convoy set off. Black let Amber drive ahead to keep Locatelli from breaking speed records, so that they had been driving for ten minutes when the valley dropped away on their left in a wide curve. A narrow path led to a high ridge, from which you could enjoy an incomparable view of the Vallis Schröteri. You could see almost the whole course of it from there, but something else was holding everyone’s attention. It was a crane, mounted on a platform that loomed into the gorge. As they approached they made out a winch at ground level. A steel cable ran through the cantilever and led to a capacious double seat. There was no need to explain how the crane worked. Once you had taken your seat, the cantilever swung over the gorge, and you floated, legs dangling, above the abyss.

‘Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!’ Marc Edwards’ extreme-sport soul was boiling over. He jumped from the parked rover, stepped to the edge of the platform and looked down. ‘What’s the drop here? How far could we abseil down?’

‘Right to the bottom,’ Peter Black explained, as if he had dug the gorge with his own hands. ‘One thousand metres.’

‘Bollocks to the Grand Canyon,’ Locatelli observed with familiar sophistication. ‘It’s a trickle of piss compared to this one.’

‘Does that thing work?’ Edwards asked.

‘Of course,’ said Julian. ‘Once the factory’s up and running, we’ll build a few more.’

‘I absolutely have to try it out!’

‘We absolutely have to try it out,’ Mimi Parker corrected him.

‘Me too.’ Julian thought he could see Rogachev smiling. ‘Perhaps Evelyn would keep me company?’

‘Oh, Oleg,’ laughed Evelyn. ‘You want to die with me?’

‘No one will die as long as I’m working the winch,’ Black promised. ‘Okay, Mimi and Marc will go down first—’

‘I’m going with Carl,’ said Amber. ‘If he has the guts.’

‘I do. With you I always do.’

‘So then Amber with Carl after that, and then Oleg and Evelyn. Momoka?’

‘No way.’

‘Then Momoka will come with us,’ Julian suggested. ‘The rest of us will climb Snake Hill in the meantime. Oleg, Evelyn, you too. It’ll take a while before Peter has lowered those four down and hoisted them back up again.’

‘I’ve had a think,’ said Amber. ‘I’d rather go up the mountain with you. What’s up, Carl?’

‘Hey! Are you bottling out?’

‘Don’t get your hopes up.’

‘Then see you later. Take care. I’ll take a look and see what lies ahead.’

Hanna watched the others start their climb. The path led gently upwards, curved around and disappeared into a ravine. It reappeared a considerable stretch further up, ran along the flank for about a hundred metres, a steep climb now, and then vanished from view once more. Clearly you had to circle the slope to reach the high plateau. Hanna would have loved to go with them, but he was more fascinated by the gorge, a kilometre deep, with vertical walls on all sides. Perhaps he could climb the high plain later on, with Mimi and Marc. He would have preferred to take the trip on his own, but wherever he went, someone would be talking to him on his headset. At least you could turn individual participants on or off, only the guides were transmitting at all times, and had a right of access to everyone’s auditory canal.

He watched with interest as Black released the winch, opened the faceplate of the console and activated the controls by pressing on one of five fist-sized buttons. Primitive lunar technology, one might have thought, built for the clumsy extremities of aliens – and wasn’t that exactly what they were on this strange satellite, aliens, extraterrestrials, their fingers forced into hard shells? Black pressed a second button. The cantilever was set in motion and began to swing in. Parker and Edwards jostled each other impatiently on the edge of the platform.

‘What are the other buttons for?’ Hanna asked.

‘The blue one swings the crane back out again,’ said Black. ‘The one below it turns the winch on.’

‘So the black one’s there to bring the lift back up again?’

‘You’ve got it. Child’s play. Like most things on the Moon, in fact, so that not everything depends on the expert.’

‘If he’s dead, for example.’ Edwards stepped back from the edge to make room for the incoming lift.

‘Don’t say things like that,’ Parker protested.

‘Don’t worry.’ Black opened the safety guard of the seats. ‘I’d consider it quite irresponsible of me to die while you’re hanging there. If some unexpected local demons swallow me up unexpectedly, you’ll still have Carl. He’ll winch you back up again. Ready? Off we go!’

‘Shit!’ said Locatelli.

They had passed the ink-black shadow of the ravine, climbed the slope and had just reached the spot where the flank curved around, when he noticed. He looked irritably down into the valley. The gorge gaped far below them, four kilometres wide, so that the platform stuck to the edge of the rock like a toy, populated by tiny, springy figures, hopping up and down. Peter was just helping the Californian into the seat, while Hanna studied the winch.

‘What’s up?’ Momoka turned round.

‘I forgot my camera.’

‘Idiot.’

‘Really?’ Locatelli took a sharp breath. ‘And who’s the other idiot? Have a think.’

‘Hey, no need to fight,’ Amber cut in. ‘We’ll just take my cam—’

‘Are you talking about me?’ Momoka snapped.

‘Who else? You could have thought about it too.’

‘Shut the hell up, Warren. What would I want to do with your stupid camera?’

‘Lots, my lotus flower! Who wants to be filmed from dawn till dusk, as if the crap that you produce for the cinema wasn’t enough?’

‘I wouldn’t pose in front of your camera if you paid me!’

‘That is so funny! You really mean that? You start pissing yourself as soon as you see a camera.’

‘Nicely put, arsehole. Go and get it, then.’

‘You bet I will,’ snapped Locatelli, and turned on his heel.

‘Hey, Warren,’ called Evelyn, quietly rapt. ‘You’re not going all the way back just for—’

‘Yep.’

‘Wait!’ shouted Julian. ‘Take Amber’s camera, she’s right. You can film Momoka with it until she pleads for mercy.’

‘No! I’m going to get the damned thing!’

He stamped defiantly back in the direction of the ravine.

‘I know he doesn’t have an easy life with me,’ he heard Momoka saying quietly to the others, as if he couldn’t hear every single word, ‘but Warren’s only happy when something’s getting on his nerves.’

‘Quite honestly, you both seem to need that,’ Amber remarked.

‘Ah, yes.’ Momoka sighed. ‘I love it when he hits back. That’s when I love him most.’

Julian, advancing with the pace of a natural leader, had almost reached the plateau when he heard Sophie’s voice in his helmet. Parked some way off, he could just see the rovers via which he was connected to the Ganymede, and via it with Gaia.

‘What is it, Sophie?’

‘I’m sorry, sir, call from Earth. I’ve got Jennifer Shaw on the line for you. Please switch to O-SEC.’

O-SEC. Bug-proof connection. It meant that he had to sever his contact with the group. No one would be able to hear what his company’s security advisor had to tell him.

‘Fine.’ He obliged. ‘We’re on our own.’

‘Julian!’ Jennifer’s voice, urgent. ‘I won’t trouble you with an endless preamble. Lynn will have told you about the warning we received yesterday. We’ve just—’

‘Lynn?’ Julian interrupted her, surprised. He turned to the others and gestured to them to stop. ‘No. Lynn didn’t tell me anything about a warning.’

‘She didn’t?’ Jennifer said, puzzled.

‘When’s that supposed to have been?’

‘Last night. Edda Hoff talked to your daughter. Lynn wanted to be kept informed about the matter. Of course I assumed that she—’

‘What matter are we talking about, Jennifer? I don’t understand a word.’

Jennifer fell silent for a moment. The delay between Earth and Moon lasted only a second, but it was enough to create irritating little pauses.

‘Two days ago we received a warning from a Chinese businessman,’ she said. ‘He happened to come into possession of a garbled text document, and since then he’s been on the run. The text suggests – or seems to suggest – that one of the company’s plants is threatened with attack.’

‘What’s that you say? Hoff said that to my daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lynn? Lynn, are you there?’

‘I’m here, Dad.’

‘What’s going on? What’s all this about?’

‘I – I didn’t want to bother you with it.’ Her voice sounded quavery and upset. ‘Of course I—’

‘Lynn, Julian, I’m sorry,’ Jennifer cut in. ‘But there’s no time for all this. The Chinese guy called me again a short time ago, or one of his people did. They’re coming straight to us. This morning they tried to find out more about the background to the document, and it ended in disaster. There were casualties, but they’ve got some new information.’

‘What kind of information? Jennifer, who—’

‘Wait, Julian. We’re in contact with the Chinese jet. I’ll put you through.’

A second passed, then a strange man’s voice was heard, amidst an atmospheric hiss:

‘Mr Orley? My name is Owen Jericho. I know you have a thousand questions, but I’ve got to ask you to listen to me now. By completing the document we’ve been able to discover that an information satellite was fired into the Earth’s orbit from African soil. The operator was the former government of Equatorial Guinea, General Juan Mayé, who took over in a coup.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Julian. ‘Mayé and his satellite. He made a laughing stock of himself with that thing.’

‘What you may not know is that Mayé was a straw man for Chinese lobbyists. It’s possible that he was put in power at the instigation of Beijing, but it was certainly done with their connivance. By now other people are in power in Equatorial Guinea, but during his time in office the Chinese sponsored his space programme. Does the name Zheng mean anything to you?’

‘The Zheng Group? Of course!’

‘Zheng made lots of their technology available to him at the time, and provided know-how and hardware. But the satellite was just a pretext to fire something else into orbit from Mayé’s state territory. Something that no official site would have allowed through.’

‘What was that?’

‘A bomb. A Korean atom bomb.’

Julian froze. He guessed, feared he guessed, what this man Jericho was getting at. He watched uneasily as the others scattered and gesticulated on the path.

‘The Koreans?’ he echoed. ‘What on earth do I have to do with—’

‘Not the Koreans, Mr Orley, but what Kim Jong Un’s abandoned ghost train left behind. We’re talking about the black market mafia. In other words, China, or somebody who’s hiding behind China, has bought a handy little atom bomb from Korean stock, a so-called mini-nuke. We’re sure that this bomb left the satellite just as it entered its orbit – so a year ago – then travelled on from there to an unknown destination. And in our opinion that destination is not on Earth.’

‘Just a moment.’ Not on Earth. ‘You mean—’

‘We mean it’s meant to destroy one of your space installations, yes. Probably Gaia. The Moon hotel.’

‘And what makes you suspect that?’ Julian heard himself saying in a remarkably calm voice.

‘The time delay. Of course there are a few variations. But none of them really explains why the thing has been up there for a year without being set off. Unless something got in the way.’ Jericho paused for a miserably long time. ‘Wasn’t Gaia originally supposed to have opened in 2024? And that was postponed because of the Moon crisis?’

Julian said nothing, as something was set in motion, slowly but inexorably, inside his head. The projectionist slipped by, put in the reel of film and—

‘Carl,’ he whispered.

‘Sorry?’ asked Jericho.

‘In the morning, two days ago,’ cried Julian. ‘My God! I saw it and didn’t understand. Carl Hanna, one of our guests. I ran into him in the corridor, he said he’d been looking for the exit and hadn’t found it, but he was lying! He was outside.’

‘Julian.’ Dana Lawrence joined in the conversation. ‘I’m afraid you’re wrong. You’ve seen the recordings. Carl definitely didn’t go outside.’

‘He did, Dana. He did! And idiot that I am, I even saw it. Down in the corridor, even though I didn’t understand it. Someone faked the recordings, re-edited the shots. He steps onto the gangway to the Lunar Express—’

‘And reappears a few seconds later.’

‘No, he was outside! He steps on it wearing a very clean suit, Dana, clean as a whistle! And when he comes out again there are traces of moon dust on his legs. That was what I was looking for the whole time, that subliminal certainty that something was wrong.’

‘Just a moment,’ Dana said sharply. ‘I’ll get the recordings up on screen.’

Clever Julian, thought Hanna.

He stood there motionlessly while the cantilever swung over the gorge, Mimi and Marc hung laughing over the abyss, and Black set the winch in motion, and he heard something that he shouldn’t have heard. But he was switched in. This time, once again, Ebola ensured that he was able to function, even though his room for manoeuvre was dramatically shrinking. He would never have expected to get busted, his identity was watertight. Not even when Vic Thorn had died had the operation been as precarious as it was right now. All of a sudden the planned course of action was out of the window; he had to act, carry out his mission prematurely, use the seconds, minutes at most, that Ebola had wangled for him to create the maximum possible confusion and take to his heels.

‘Have the hotel searched right now,’ Owen Jericho was saying. ‘This guy Carl, perhaps he’s been outside to hide the bomb in Gaia. Ask him—’

‘I will ask him,’ hissed Julian. ‘Oh, I’ll ask him!’

Yeah, right, thought Hanna.

The lift sank slowly into the gorge. Black stood by the winch, waving at the Californians. Wanted to know what it felt like being a kilometre above the ground.

‘Amazing!’ raved Parker. ‘Better than parachute jumping. Better than anything.’

Hanna got moving, stretched his arms out.

‘Can you speed the pace up a bit?’ asked Edwards. ‘Speed it up. Let us fly!’

‘Sure, I—’

With both hands Hanna grabbed Black by the backpack, pulled him away from the console, lifted him in the air and carried him to the edge.

‘Hey!’ The pilot reached behind him. ‘Carl, is that you?’

Hanna said nothing, walked quickly on. His captive turned, kicked his legs, tried to get a hold of his assailant.

‘Carl, what’s going on? Have you gone mad? – No!’

He hurled Black over the edge of the platform. For a moment the pilot seemed to find purchase in the void, then he fell, comparatively slowly at first, getting faster and faster. His shrill scream mingled with Mimi Parker’s.

Nothing, not even a sixth of terrestrial gravity, could save a person falling into an abyss from a height of one thousand metres.

Gaia, Vallis Alpina

‘Julian?’ called Sophie. ‘Miss Shaw?’

‘What’s going on?’ snapped Dana.

‘Radio silence. Both gone.’ She tried in turn to re-establish connection with headquarters in London and with Julian, but all communication had been interrupted immediately after the start of the video showing the miraculous sullying of Hanna’s trouser legs in the sterile surroundings of a gangway. The Canadian, small and cheerful, went for a walk on the corridor conveyor belt, unnoticed by anyone.

‘Julian? Please come in!’

‘Try to reach the Earth in the conventional manner,’ said Dana. ‘Oh, don’t worry, let me do it.’

‘She pushed Sophie aside, pulled up a menu, switched from LPCS on direct aerial connection to the terrestrial Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, targeted ground stations, which was just possible within view of Earth, but Gaia seemed to have been deprived of her sensory organs. Lynn stared, her hand in front of her mouth, at the monitor wall, while Sophie shifted nervously from one leg to the other.

‘I was carrying on the conversation quite normally when—’

‘Don’t apologise before I start blaming you,’ Dana yelled at her. ‘Keep on trying. Perform an analysis. I want to know where the problem lies. Lynn?’

Lynn turned her head as if in a trance.

‘Can I speak to you for a minute?’

‘What?’

Rigid with fury, Dana left the control centre. Lynn followed her into the hall like a robot.

‘I think—’

‘Sorry!’ Dana flashed her inquisitorial grey-green eyes. ‘You’re my boss, Lynn, and that means I have to be respectful. But now I have to ask you very clearly what yesterday’s warning was about.’

Lynn looked as if she had been recalled to life after a long period of unconsciousness. She raised a hand and studied its palm as if it contained something very attractive.

‘It was all pretty vague.’

‘What was vague?’

‘Edda Hoff called and said a few people were planning some sort of attack on an Orley plant. It sounded – well, vague. Not like anything to worry about.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me about it straight away?’

‘I didn’t think it was necessary.’

‘I’m the manager and the security officer of this hotel, and you didn’t think it was necessary?’

Lynn stopped studying the palm of her hand and stared furiously back.

‘As you have already observed, Dana, I am your boss and, no, I didn’t think it was necessary to inform you. According to Hoff it was an extremely vague suspicion that somewhere in the world at some point an attack on one of our plants was planned, which was why she wanted to talk to me or Julian and not to you, and Julian had enough on his plate, so I asked to be kept informed. Does that answer your question?’

Dana took a step nearer. As if the prospect of disaster were not hovering about the hotel, Lynn found herself immersed in fascinated thoughts about the mysteries of the Dana physiognomy. How could such a sensually full mouth look so hard? Was the pallor of the face, framed by coppery red, due to the light, to a genetic predisposition or merely to Dana’s bitterness? How was it possible to seethe with rage and yet reveal such mask-like indifference?

‘Maybe you missed a few things back there,’ the manager said quietly. ‘But there was talk of this hotel being blown up by an atom bomb. One of your guests seems to be involved in it. We’ve lost contact with your father and with Earth. You should at any rate have talked to me about it.’

‘You know what?’ said Lynn. ‘You should get on with your work.’

She left Dana standing and went back to the control centre. The video of Hanna was still flickering on the monitor wall. The manager followed her slowly.

‘I’d love to,’ she said icily. ‘Are you overworked, Lynn? Are you up to this? A moment ago you looked as if you’d been paralysed.’

Sophie looked up and away again, not liking what she saw.

‘I’m afraid we’ve had a satellite failure,’ she said. ‘I can’t reach Earth or Ganymede or Callisto. Shall I try the Peary Base?’

‘Later. First we’ll have to talk through the next few steps. If what we’ve just heard is true, we’re threatened with catastrophe.’

‘What kind of catastrophe?’ asked Tim.

Aristarchus Plateau

Locatelli caught his breath.

He saw Black disappearing just as he stepped from the shadow of the ravine and back into the sunlight. He stared at the scene as if nailed to the spot. It wasn’t easy to tell who had pushed whom into the gorge, and he had switched the gang down there to mute, but there was no doubt that it had been deliberate.

It had been no accident. That was murder!

Warren Locatelli was accused of lots of dubious qualities: uncouthness, recklessness, narcissism and much besides, but cowardice wasn’t among them. His Italian–Algerian temperament broke through, flooded his thoughts. As he started running he saw the murderer pull something from his thigh.

And Edwards saw it too.

Below them, Black’s flailing figure became smaller and smaller. He knew enough about gravitational physics to be aware that the pilot would not survive the fall, despite the reduction in gravitational pull. The rate of his fall might be slower than on Earth, twelve metres might be the equivalent of two, but there was no air resistance to counteract it. Black’s body would be accelerated in a linear fashion, determined entirely by mass attraction. With each second his speed would increase by 1.63 metres until he landed at the bottom like a meteorite.

And he and Mimi would—

He was filled with fresh horror. He looked to the edge of the platform and saw the astronaut who had pushed Black into the depths, holding something long and flat in his right hand.

‘Carl?’ he wheezed.

The astronaut didn’t reply. In the same moment Edwards worked out that they too were in extreme danger. He started tugging like mad on his safety guard, bent it to the side and rose from his seat. They had to get out of here. Climb up the rope, back over the cantilever to solid ground, their only chance.

‘What are you doing?’ screamed Mimi.

Edwards was about to reply, but the answer stuck in his throat. The astronaut raised the long object, aimed it at the seat contraption and fired. Instead of gunpowder the little piece of plasticene detonated in the shell. The liquid from the jelly capsule evaporated, swelled to many times its volume and produced sufficient pressure to fire the projectile at him at high speed. It pierced Parker’s helmet, at which point the shower gel and shampoo combined to form what they really were, namely explosives, and the chairlift flew apart along with its occupants, flinging steel, fibre-glass, electronics and body parts in all directions.

Hanna reholstered his weapon and strode towards the parked rovers.

Locatelli was faster. He jumped, scrabbled, slipped down the path, but he had a longer distance to travel. So he looked on as the fleeing astronaut reached the front of a rover and swung himself onto the driver’s seat. Now once more within view of Julian’s group, he heard a Babel of voices breaking out in his helmet, provoked by something that Amber had said. A moment later the murderer drove away at great speed.

‘Shit,’ wheezed Locatelli. ‘Stop, you bastard!’

‘Warren, what’s going on?’ said Momoka. ‘Answer, please.’

‘I’m here.’

‘Amber said you’d made contact with Black and heard screams. She says—’

Locatelli stumbled. His leaps were too high, too risky. He missed the path, spread his arms out, landed on a steep bank of gravel and turned a somersault.

‘Warren! For Christ’s sake, what’s going on?’

Up and down switched places. He hurtled downwards at great speed, towards the edge of the gorge. His body, light as a child’s, took off every few metres, soared briefly before landing again, so that he could no longer see or hear; dust, nothing but dust, but his suit didn’t seem to have been damaged. Otherwise I’d be dead, he thought, that doesn’t take long out here, you’re dead before you’ve even noticed.

‘Warren!’

‘A minute,’ he yelled. ‘Ow! Ouch! A minute!’

‘Where are—’

The connection went dead. He slid along the plain on his belly, pushed himself up and landed on his feet, hurried to the second rover. With one spring he was behind the wheel. By now he was being yelled at from all directions, but he’d stopped paying the slightest attention. He didn’t doubt for a moment what the guy was planning, namely to leave them here and clear off on Ganymede.

Was the bastard listening?

It was better to turn off all his connections. The other guy should learn as late as possible that someone was following him. He quickly pressed the central switch, silenced the voices in his head, put his foot on the accelerator and dashed after the fleeing man.

Gaia, Vallis Alpina

Tim had just appeared in the control centre when Dana gave a warning about some sort of catastrophe. The atmospheric barometer was clearly below freezing, with the hotel manager as cooling element, it seemed to him, while Sophie’s features were helpless and Lynn’s desolate. She looked to Tim like a drowning woman whose fear did battle with the fury of not having learned to swim in time.

‘What’s up?’ he asked.

Dana looked at him thoughtfully. Then she delivered her report. Concise, to the point, toneless, without euphemism or down-playing of any kind. Within a minute Tim knew that someone was trying to blow Gaia to atoms, that the Chinese might be behind it, but that in all likelihood it was Carl Hanna, nice, guitar-playing Carl, in whose company Amber was currently out and about.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ he said. ‘How certain is it that there’s a bomb?’

‘Nothing’s certain. Speculations, but as long as they haven’t been refuted we should give them the status of facts.’ Her eyes emitted a freezing beam towards Lynn. ‘Miss Orley, any ideas, in your capacity as boss?’

Lynn gasped for air.

‘There isn’t the slightest reason to blow up Gaia! It must be a mistake.’

‘Thanks, that’s a great help to us. Give me a directive, or allow me to make some suggestions of my own. We could order an evacuation, for example.’

Lynn clenched her fists. She looked as if she wanted to tear out Dana’s voice box.

‘If there really was a bomb in the hotel, why didn’t it go off ages ago? I mean, who or what was it being aimed at? The construction site? Anyone in particular?’

‘We’re all in danger,’ said Tim. ‘Who’s going to bring an atom bomb to the Moon with a view to sparing human lives?’

‘Exactly.’ Lynn looked at them in turn. ‘And so far we’ve all gathered together every night, so why hasn’t anything happened? Perhaps because there is no bomb? Because someone’s just trying to scare us?’

‘Hmm,’ said Sophie hesitantly. ‘As this guy Jericho’s already said, Hanna’s task might have been to get the bomb here. If it reached the Moon a year ago—’

‘Did Gaia even exist a year ago?’ asked Tim.

‘In its raw state.’ Lynn nodded.

‘That means it could have been here since then.’

‘An atom bomb?’ Dana’s face expressed scepticism. ‘Sorry, but even I don’t believe that. I don’t know much about mini-nukes, I have no idea about atomic weapons, but I think I know they give off radiation. Wouldn’t this bomb do that too? How long could you ignore something like that?’

‘Perhaps Hanna only brought it up here the day before yesterday,’ Sophie concluded. ‘On his night-time—’

‘That’s pure speculation!’ Lynn flung her hand in the air with exasperation. ‘Just because he had some dust on his trousers. And even if he did, why didn’t he set it off ages ago?’

‘Perhaps he was waiting for the right moment,’ Tim suggested.

‘And when would that be?’

‘No idea.’ Sophie shook her head. Her curls flew around as if having a party, in spite of the drama of the situation. ‘Certainly not now. Apart from Miss Orley and Tim there are only comparatively unimportant people here.’

‘Fine!’ said Lynn triumphantly. ‘Then that means that we don’t have to evacuate after all.’

‘I’m not keen on an evacuation, if that’s what you mean,’ Dana replied calmly. ‘But I’ll do it if it strikes me as advisable. For the time being I agree with Sophie. Things will probably only get critical when the shuttles come back, which should be happening at about seven o’clock. At the moment it’s’ – she looked at the electronic display – ‘16.20. More than two and a half hours to look for the thing.’

‘Excuse me?’ Lynn rolled her eyes. ‘We’re supposed to comb the hotel?’

‘Yes. In teams.’

‘We’d be looking for a needle in a haystack!’

‘And finding it if there is one. Sophie, get the rest of them together. We’ll concentrate on places where a thing like that could be hidden.’

‘How big is a mini-nuke?’ Sophie asked helplessly.

‘The size of a briefcase?’ Dana shrugged. ‘Does anyone know?’

Shaking of heads. On the screen Sophie opened several windows with schema-grams and tables full of numbers.

‘At any rate, we’re not registering any unusual radiation levels,’ she said. ‘No increased radioactivity, no additional sources of heat.’

‘Because there’s no bomb here,’ sulked Lynn.

‘And the sensors cover every area?’ asked Tim.

‘Every accessible area, yes.’

‘We should address another issue before we set off on our search,’ said Dana. ‘In my view we’re not just dealing with a bomb.’

‘What else, then?’

‘With a traitor.’

‘Oh Christ!’ Lynn shook her head. ‘I thought Carl was the bad guy.’

‘Carl is a bad guy. But who re-edited the video? Who helped him leave Gaia on the Lunar Express?’ she added with a sidelong glance at Lynn. ‘Your father seems to have a very keen faculty of observation.’

‘You think one of us is working for Carl?’ asked Tim.

‘You don’t?’

‘I don’t know enough about it.’

‘You know exactly as much as the rest of us do. How is Hanna going to cope up here all by himself? Acting and blurring his traces at the same time? Why did the satellites fail when his name was mentioned? How much can we put down to chance?’

‘But who would it be?’ Sophie’s girlish face was filled with horror. ‘Nobody on the staff. And certainly not one of the guests.’

‘Hanna came here as a guest. A guest personally chosen by Julian Orley. How could he win so much trust?’ Dana studied Lynn. Her gaze wandered on to Sophie, and settled on Tim. ‘So, the other one, who is he? Or is it a she? Someone in this room?’

‘Utter nonsense,’ snapped Lynn.

‘Could be. But that’s one reason for us to search in teams.’ Dana smiled thinly. ‘So that we can keep an eye on each other.’

Aristarchus Plateau

Hanna only registered that he was being chased after quite a long time. The last thing he had heard amidst the chaos in his helmet was that there was no longer any connection between Gaia and headquarters in London, or the Chinese jet. Hydra had discussed a few possible ways of paralysing communication from the Moon or the Earth if the situation required. Clearly Ebola had been active. Now they were only connected by the radio in their suits, or by the aerials of the rovers and the shuttle, although that required visible contact. The last voice he had heard was Locatelli’s, which had clearly been closer to him than the others.

Was he charging after him?

Hanna swerved around a small crater. The rover’s top speed was eighty kilometres an hour, but that was almost impossible to reach. The vehicle was light, particularly when under-occupied, and kept lifting off the ground, leaving clouds of dust behind. Somewhere in the washed-out grey the other vehicle had suddenly appeared, and it was quickly approaching. Either the driver had underestimated the particular qualities of gravity up here, or he was working from professional experience.

Locatelli was a racing driver.

It had to be him!

Hanna briefly considered stopping and blowing him up, but the swirl of dust wouldn’t exactly help his aim, and he would also lose time. Better to increase his distance. Once he had reached the shuttle it didn’t matter what became of Locatelli and the others. It wasn’t likely they’d manage to leave the Aristarchus Plateau, but even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to stop him. He had more than enough time left to carry out the operation and settle in the OSS. From there he could—

The right front wheel sped up. The rover performed a leap, landed crookedly, skidded along and wrapped Hanna in grey clouds. For a moment he lost his bearings. Uncertain in which direction to turn, he set off again, found himself facing the gaping depths of the Schröter Valley, and at the very last second quickly whipped the wheel around, saved himself as best he could. Clearly the only weapon that could be used against Locatelli was speed.

Dust. The monster that swallowed everything up.

Locatelli cursed. The bastard in front of him was whirling up so much of it that he had to hold back to keep from getting too close to him and dashing blindly to his death. Then, all of a sudden, it looked as if the murderer himself were driving into the abyss. He was just short of the edge when he regained control over his vehicle and whipped it on, whirling up clouds of tiny particles that glittered in their billions in the sunlight, as if the regolith were filled with glass. Darkness fell around Locatelli, then the clouds lifted. A moment later he saw the rover right in front of him with astonishing clarity. The subfloor had changed, asphalted terrain now, only a few hundred metres still to go to the Ganymede. Dark and massive, it rested on its beetle legs—

What had the guy actually fired at him? A tiny island of pensiveness appeared in the whipped-up ocean of his fury, a place of quiet contemplation. What in hell’s name was he doing here? What could he do to someone who was carrying deadly weapons and had no discernible qualms about using them? A moment later new waves of fury thundered through him, blowing away all his reservations. The murderer didn’t even seem to find him worth a bullet. He hurtled like mad towards the shuttle, brought the rover to a standstill under the tail, jumped from his seat and hurried to the lock shaft that protruded from the Ganymede’s abdomen like a monstrous birth canal. Only at the last second, with one leg in the cabin, did he pause and turn his reflective visor towards Locatelli.

‘You miserable creep!’ cried Locatelli, trying to wrest from the electric motor a performance that it had never managed before. ‘Wait, just wait!’

The astronaut put his hand to his thigh and drew the long, flat thing.

He finally realised what an unfavourable position his recklessness had placed him in. He saw himself through the eyes of his enemy, the cross-hairs practically painted on his helmet, one big invitation to pull the trigger—

‘Shit,’ he whispered.

He let go of the wheel as if it were made of red-hot steel, jumped from the rover, turned a somersault and skidded away across the smooth asphalt, as the vehicle dashed on with no one to stop it, straight towards Ganymede and the astronaut. A bright flash outshone the cold, white sun in the sky. The rover was hurled upwards, stood upright, and spat parts of its frame, splinters of chassis, scraps of gold foil and electronic components in all directions. Locatelli instinctively threw his arms together over his helmet. Beside him, debris ploughed grooves into the asphalt. He quickly rolled onto his back, then as he sat up he saw one of the wheels wobbling wildly towards him; he catapulted himself out of the way and got to his feet.

No! Not on my watch!

Crouching and expecting the worst, he ran across the landing field, but his adversary had vanished. He saw the illuminated cabin climbing the lock shaft. A few minutes more. He couldn’t let the murderer steal the Ganymede and leave them in the desert. Heedless of the injuries he had dealt himself in his stunt, he ran under the body of the shuttle to the lock shaft. The lift cabin was gone, but the display showed a red light, and while it was red, Black had explained to them, the shaft couldn’t be retracted. The astronaut must still be in the lock, which was probably being filled with air at that very minute. Good, very good.

Locatelli panted, waited.

Green!

He struck the call button with the flat of his hand.

Hanna wasted no time taking off his helmet after leaving the lock. He hurried between the rows of seats to the cockpit. Had he killed Locatelli? Probably not. The man had jumped off, Hanna had seen his body flying through the vacuum, before the projectile had struck the rover. The wreck might have crashed on top of him, or he might have been hit by some of the flying debris. Without looking behind him, he slipped into the pilot’s seat and ran an eye over the display. He knew what the devices were for, he had had an opportunity to familiarise himself with the workings of all lunar vehicles some months ago. Thanks to Hydra’s perfect preparatory work he even knew enough to drive the spaceship back into orbit, and from there to the OSS, and he wasn’t alone on board as long as Ebola found a way of contacting him after communication had been blocked. Something he probably didn’t need to worry about. Ebola would make sure he got there, and appeared in the right place at the right time.

His fingers slid over the controls.

He hesitated.

What was that? The shaft wouldn’t move. The display was red, which meant that the cabin was currently being drained, or filled with air – or on its way!

He quickly turned around.

No, it was there, the space evenly lit behind the narrow windows, and deserted. Hanna narrowed his eyes. He paused. A sudden urge impelled him to get up and check, but he couldn’t afford any further delays, and the light had just switched from red to green.

Ganymede was ready to go.

‘There. There!’

Amber pointed excitedly into the sky. A long way off something was climbing steeply into the sky, something long that glinted in the sun.

‘The Ganymede!’

They had come hurrying down the path, mindless, breathless, in clumsy kangaroo leaps, back to the crane platform, only to discover that both rovers had disappeared. Not a soul far and wide. Black’s cries still echoed in Amber’s ears:

Carl, what’s going on? Have you gone m— No!

Carl?

She had run anxiously out onto the platform and seen what was left of the gondola in which Mimi and Marc should have been sitting. More precisely, there was no gondola. Just the useless back of a chair, twisted steel, the contorted scrap of a safety guard and behind it, wedged in, something white, something numbingly familiar—

A single leg.

Only an extreme effort of will had kept her from throwing up in her helmet, while the others had stared down into the gorge and kept a lookout for the missing man. But large parts of the valley were in shadow, so they couldn’t see anything at all.

‘They’re dead,’ Rogachev had stated at last.

‘How can you claim that they’re dead?’ Evelyn said excitedly.

‘That is a corpse.’ Rogachev pointed to the amputated leg in the ruined gondola.

‘No, that’s – that’s—’

None of them had managed to speak its name. What an unbearable idea, that the fate of that shredded individual would only be fulfilled when it gave that limb an identity and thus retrospectively supplied the facts.

‘We have to look for her,’ said Evelyn.

‘Later.’ Julian stared at the place where the vehicles had just been standing. ‘We have worse things to worry about right now.’

‘Don’t you think that’s bad enough?’ snapped Momoka.

‘I think it’s terrible. But first we have to find the rovers.’

‘Warren?’ Momoka resumed her mantra-like calls to her husband. ‘Warren, where are you?’

‘Assuming they managed it—’ Evelyn tried again.

‘They’re dead,’ Rogachev cut her off in a voice of ice. ‘Five people are missing. At least two of those are alive, otherwise both vehicles couldn’t have disappeared, but the others are down there. Do you want to abseil down there and poke about in the dark?’

‘How do you know it isn’t – it isn’t Carl down there?’

‘Because Carl’s alive,’ Amber had said wearily, to keep things short. ‘I think he has Peter and the others on his conscience.’

‘What makes you so sure about that?’

‘Amber’s right,’ Julian had said. ‘Carl’s a traitor, I realised that a few minutes ago. Believe me, we do have a bigger problem than that here! We urgently have to think about how we—’

At that moment Amber saw the shuttle rising on the horizon. For a moment it seemed to stand still above Cobra Head, then it came towards them and suddenly got bigger.

It’s flying this way, she thought.

The armoured body was gaining form and outline, but also, worryingly, altitude. Whoever was flying the Ganymede plainly didn’t plan to land and pick them up. The machine moved silently overhead, accelerated, turned in a northerly direction, shrank to a dot and disappeared.

‘Julian, call Gaia,’ urged Evelyn. ‘They’ve got to pick us up from here.’

‘It’s not going to happen.’ Julian sighed. ‘The connection’s been broken.’

‘Broken?’ cried Momoka, horrified. ‘How come it’s broken?’

‘No idea. I did say we had a bigger problem.’

Berlin, Germany

Xin’s transformation back from a lion-maned Mando-Progger to a perfectly normal contract killer was as good as complete when his contact called.

On the way back from the Grand Hyatt he had constantly asked himself what the two policemen had been doing there. No doubt about it, they had been after Tu – Jericho and the girl as well – but to what end? Jericho wasn’t mentioned by name in Berlin, so the investigators had their sights set on Tu. Why him, of all people?

On the other hand he didn’t care. Admittedly he had had to disappear without having achieved anything, but his intuition told him he had arrived too late anyway. The group had cleared off. So what? What were they going to do? Vogelaar and his wife were dead, the crystal was in his possession. While he put his wigs and fake beards away, he took the call.

‘Kenny, damn it, how could that happen?’

No Hydra, no other greeting. Just anxious whispering. Xin hesitated. His contact was beside himself.

‘How could what happen?’ he asked warily.

‘It’s all going down the tubes! This guy Tu and this Jericho guy and the girl, all the contraband is on its way to us, and they know! They know everything! About the parcel, about the attack! They’ve even had a chance to talk to Julian Orley. Our cover’s being blown!’

Xin froze. The Mando-Progger’s Tartar beard lay in his hand like a small, dead animal.

‘That’s impossible,’ he whispered.

‘Impossible? Well, then perhaps you could come here! Right now the company’s being hit by a devastating earthquake.’

‘But I’ve got the dossier.’

‘So have they!’

A volley of oaths rained down on Xin, taking in, amongst other hardships, the unmasking of Hanna and the activation of the communication block. The latter had been planned as an emergency measure in case details of the attack were to seep through prematurely to the Moon. Something no one at Hydra had seriously reckoned with, but that was exactly what had happened.

‘When was the net jammed?’ asked Xin.

‘During the linkup.’ The other man breathed sharply into the receiver. ‘Over the next twenty-four hours the Moon will be cut off from everything, but we can’t keep the block going for ever. I just hope Hanna gets the situation under control. Not to mention Ebola.’

Ebola. Hanna’s right hand was a specialist when it came to infecting supposedly independent systems and weakening them from within. That Ebola had managed to interrupt the fatal linkup could be seen as a brilliant manoeuvre, a skilful turnaround in the adverse wind of circumstances, but unfortunately on a leaking boat.

Vogelaar had outwitted him.

No! Xin forced himself to calm down. They weren’t leaking yet. He had chosen Hanna and Ebola because they knew how to improvise and would keep the upper hand, regardless of how inauspicious the circumstances might be. He planned not to waste a second brooding on the possibility that the undertaking might go wrong.

‘And how are you going to force this Tu and his rat-pack to see sense?’ the other man raged. ‘You’ve lost Mickey Reardon, two of your people died in Shanghai, you can’t count on Gudmundsson and his team at the moment, they’re otherwise engaged, so how do you think—’

‘Not at all,’ Xin cut in.

Puzzled, his contact fell silent.

‘There’s no longer any point in eliminating Tu’s group,’ Xin explained to him. ‘The facts of the situation have become common knowledge, the dissemination of the dossier can no longer be stopped. Everything else is decided on the Moon.’

‘Damn it, Kenny. We’ve been busted!’

‘No. My task right now is to protect Hydra from being unmasked. Does he know about it yet?’

‘I told him five minutes ago. He’d be glad of a personal call from you, otherwise I’ve got to sign off now, such a bloody mess! What happens if they track me down? What am I supposed to do then?’

‘Nobody’s going to get busted.’

‘But they’re bringing the dossier with them! I don’t know what’s in it. Perhaps it would be better—’

‘Just chill.’ The tearful whining at the other end was starting to make Xin feel ill.‘I’ll come to London as quickly as possible. I’ll be near you, and if things get tight I’ll get you out.’

‘My God, Kenny! How on earth could this happen?’

‘Pull yourself together,’ Xin snapped. ‘The only risk is that you lose your nerve. Go back to the others and act as if nothing’s wrong.’

‘I hope Hanna knows what he’s doing.’

‘That’s why I chose him.’

Xin finished the conversation, swapped his phone from one hand to the other and inspected the room. As might have been expected, he noticed thousands of things that weren’t right, things that were asymmetrical, things that were out of proportion, strange excrescences in the design, an irritating bouquet of flowers. The florist hadn’t been skilled enough to make the number of petals a multiple of the number of the flowers, thus giving the sorry effort some kind of mathematical meaning. For want of a self-contained idea, the supposedly aesthetic function failing to correspond to a structural one, the arrangement had something menacingly haphazard about it – a nightmare for Xin. The mere idea of being unable to produce a rationale for one’s actions was totally horrifying! He reluctantly dialled another number, held his mobile in his left hand, while the fingers of his right gripped the flowers and tried to correct the arrangement.

‘Hydra,’ he said.

‘How big is the dossier?’ asked the voice.

‘I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.’ Kenny pinched at a lily. ‘I’m sorry about what happened. Of course I’ll assume full responsibility, but we could do nothing more than threaten Vogelaar with torture and death. He must have passed on a copy of the dossier to Jericho.’

‘You’re not guilty,’ said the voice. ‘What’s crucial is that the block still stands. What do you have in mind?’

‘Change of tack. Take the heat off Jericho, Tu and Yoyo. Their deaths are no longer a priority, and we can’t influence what’s happening on the Moon. I remain convinced that the operation will be a complete success. The important thing now is to preserve Hydra’s anonymity.’

‘Do we agree on the weak points?’

‘From my point of view there’s only the one we’ve already discussed.’

‘That’s exactly how I see it.’

Xin considered the flower arrangement. Not really any better, still without any semiotic content. ‘I’ll take the next plane to London.’

‘Are you well enough equipped there?’

‘Airbike and everything. If necessary I can summon reinforcements.’

‘Gudmundsson is busy, you know that.’

‘My net stretches wide. I could set legions marching, but that won’t be necessary. I keep myself constantly at the ready, so that should do it.’

‘Tell me about the basic information in the dossier. Now that we’ve shelved email communication, unfortunately you can’t send it to me any more.’

‘But it was still right to take the pages off the net.’

‘Keep me posted.’

Xin paused.

Then he threw his phone on the bed and turned his mounting rage on orchids, lilies and crocuses. He had to leave Berlin as soon as possible, but he couldn’t even leave this room as long as the arrangement was subject to an unsatisfactory structure. The world was not random. Not haphazard. Everything had to yield a meaning. Where the meaning ended, madness began.

The head of a lily broke off.

Bobbing with fury, Kenny Xin tore the whole arrangement out of its bowl and shoved it in the bin.

Gaia, Vallis Alpina, The Moon

Lynn had decided to search the subterranean areas of Gaia along with Sophie. Tim sensed the reason for that. She dreaded arguments with him, because she knew very well that she would no longer be able to keep up her pretence. She was still able to lie to herself. Her attitude alternated between moments of complete clarity, subjectivity and erupting fury. That abysmal, night-black fear dwelt once more in her every glance, the fear that might easily have killed her years before, and Tim thought he noticed something else in it, something vaguely insidious that frightened him to the core. As he poked through the casino with Axel Kokoschka, the chef, his concern swung from her to Amber, who was travelling with a suspected terrorist. Julian had received the information on a protected frequency, but how had he reacted? Peter Black was with him. Had they caught Carl?

What was happening right now on the Aristarchus Plateau?

Amber, he thought, come in! Please!

Gaia’s underground floors, by Dana’s estimation, deserved particular attention, because it was from there that a bomb would release its greatest destructive force. Michio Funaki and Ashwini Anand had been assigned to the staff accommodation areas, Lynn and Sophie to the underground greenhouses, aquaria and storage units. Gaia’s mirror world stretched down deep – but then staff plans for 2026 allowed for one employee per guest.

‘In the meantime I will try to reach the Peary Base,’ Dana had said before they went off in different directions.

‘How, without a satellite?’ Tim had asked.

‘Via the dedicated line. There’s a direct laser connection between Gaia and the base. We send the data back and forth via a system of mirrors.’

‘What do you mean, mirrors? Ordinary, common-or-garden mirrors?’

‘The first one is on the far side of the gorge. A thin, very high mast. You can see it from your suite.’

‘And how many are there?’

‘Not all that many. A dozen to the Pole. Arranged in such a way that the light-beam passes around crater rims and mountains. To reach shuttles, spaceships or even the Earth, of course you need satellites, but for intralunar communication between two fixed points there’s nothing better. No atmosphere to scatter the light, no rain – so I’ll set out our situation to them in the hope that they aren’t having any problems with their satellites there, but my optimism is muted.’

And then, after Lynn had disappeared with Sophie into the lift, Dana had taken him aside.

‘Tim, this is awkward for me. You know I don’t tend to beat around the bush, but in this case—’

He sighed, troubled by dark forebodings. ‘Is it about Lynn?’

‘Yes. What’s up with her?’

Tim looked at the floor, at the walls, wherever you looked to keep from returning the other person’s gaze.

‘Look, Lynn and I never had personal contact,’ Dana went on. ‘But she supported my appointment at the time, and trained me up, in the camp, on the Moon, confidently and competently, entirely admirable. Now she strikes me as irresponsible, erratic, belligerent. She’s changed completely.’

‘I—’ Tim hemmed and hawed for a moment. ‘I’ll talk to her.’

‘I didn’t ask you to.’

Her quizzical eyes fastened on his. Suddenly it occurred to Tim that Dana Lawrence wasn’t blinking. He hadn’t seen her blink for ages. He remembered a film, Alien, a quite old but still excellent flick that Julian loved, in which one of the crew members was unexpectedly revealed as an android.

‘I don’t know how I should answer that,’ he said.

‘No, you do, you know very well.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Lynn is your sister, Tim. I want to know if we can trust her. Has she got herself under control?’

The clouds began to clear in Tim’s head. He looked at the manager, illuminated by the realisation of what she actually meant.

‘Are you suggesting Lynn is Carl’s accomplice?’ he asked, almost lost for words.

‘I just want to hear what you think.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘All of this is crazy. Come on, we’re running out of time. It would be a great weight off my mind if I was wrong, but three days ago Lynn tried with all her might to persuade her father that he was imagining things. She wanted to withhold the surveillance camera videos from him, she left me in the dark about Edda Hoff’s warning, although she really should have talked to me. All in all she’s behaving as if we had dreamed up the events of the past thirty minutes, even though she herself has been involved from the very start.’

That’s not true, Tim wanted to say, and in fact Dana was wrong about one thing. Lynn hadn’t been there from the start. Sophie had taken the call while his sister had been sitting in the Selene with the manager and the cooks, talking about the possibility of a picnic at the bottom of the Vallis Alpina. Jennifer Shaw had wanted to talk to Lynn or her father, so Sophie had immediately sent a message to the Selene and the security advisors had immediately put it through to Julian on the Aristarchus Plateau. By the time Lynn and Dana had reached headquarters, the conversation was already well under way.

But what difference did that make?

‘As you said before, Lynn is my sister.’ He straightened up and shifted away a little. ‘I’d walk on hot coals for her.’

‘That’s not enough for me.’

‘Well, it’ll have to be.’

‘Tim.’ Dana sighed. ‘I just want to make sure that we’re not about to face problems from somewhere we least expect it. Tell me what’s up. I’ll treat our conversation with complete confidentiality, no one will find out about it if you don’t want them to. Not Julian, and certainly not Lynn.’

‘Dana, really—’

‘I’ve got to be able to do my job!’

Tim said nothing for a moment.

‘She had a breakdown,’ he said flatly. ‘A few years ago. Exhausted, depressed. It came and went, but since then I can’t stop worrying that it might repeat itself.’

‘Burn-out?’

‘No, more of an—’ The word wouldn’t leave his lips.

‘Illness?’ Dana completed his sentence.

‘Lynn played it down, but – yes. A morbid disposition. Her – our mother was depressive. In the end she—’

He fell silent. Dana waited to see if he was going to add anything, but he thought he’d said enough.

‘Thanks,’ she said seriously. ‘Please keep an eye on your sister.’

He nodded unhappily, joined Kokoschka, and they set off, equipped with portable detectors, while he felt like a miserable bloody collaborator. At the same time he was tormented by Dana’s suspicion. Not because he saw Lynn as being exposed to unjustified suspicions, but because uncertainty was gnawing at him. Could he really walk on coals for Lynn? He would give his life for her, that much he knew, regardless of what she did.

But he just wasn’t completely sure.

Ganymede

Locatelli lay in a foetal position, legs bent, on the floor of the lock just by the bulkheads. Almost two-thirds of the cabin was glazed, but as long as he stayed down low, shielded by the screen, no one would be able to see him from the passenger space or the cockpit. He feverishly developed and rejected one plan after another. Every time he turned his head, he could just make out the indicators on the inside wall of the lock, showing pressure, air and ambient temperature. The cabin was pressurised, but he didn’t dare take off his helmet. He was too worried that the pilot might, at that precise moment, get the idea of subjecting the lock to an inspection, just as he was busying himself with his damned helmet. He had squeezed his way in between the bulkheads as soon as they had slid apart, pressed the up button, dropped to the floor, without wasting a fragment of a second. And yet it couldn’t have escaped the guy that the cabin had gone back down again.

He cautiously raised himself up a little and peered around for anything that might serve as a weapon, but there was nothing inside the lock that could be used to slash or stab. The Ganymede was still accelerating. He guessed that there must be an autopilot, but as long as the shuttle hadn’t reached its final speed, whoever was sitting up at the front couldn’t take his eyes off the controls. Later it might be too late to shed his armour and his helmet. Perhaps he really should do it now.

At that moment an idea came to him.

He quickly released the catches of the helmet and took it off, set it down next to him and started frantically working away at his chest armour. The acceleration pressure eased off. He hastily fiddled around with the valves and fasteners, peeled himself out of his survival backpack and pushed everything a little way away. Now he was more mobile, and he also had something that could be used as a weapon in a surprise attack. Every muscle tensed, he lay there and waited. The shuttle flew in a curve, and went on gaining altitude. His head roared with the certainty that this was his only chance. If he didn’t catch and whack Peter or Carl, whichever of them was flying the Ganymede, at the first opportunity, he might as well say goodbye to the world.

Don’t complain, asshole, he thought, this was what you wanted. And strangely – or not – his inner voice, in all its condescension, and down to peculiarities of its modulation sounded exactly like Momoka’s.

Gaia, Vallis Alpina

Dana walked to her desk and paused.

Depressive. That explained a few things. But how did depressive states develop? Into apathy? Aggression? Would Lynn freak out? What was Julian’s daughter likely to do?

She established the laser connection with the Peary Base. After a few seconds the face of deputy commander Tommy Wachowski appeared on the screen. There wasn’t much in the way of regular exchange between hotel and base, which meant that it was ages since she had last spoken to him. Wachowski looked tense and relieved at the same time, as if she had taken a weight off his mind with her call. Dana thought she knew the reason. A moment later Wachowski confirmed her suspicion.

‘Am I happy to see you,’ he growled. ‘I thought we’d never get through to anyone ever again.’

‘Have you been having problems with the satellites?’ she asked.

His eyes widened. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Because we have too. We were in contact with Earth when the connection went down. We haven’t been able to get through since then, not even to our shuttles.’

‘We’ve been having pretty much the same thing. Completely cut off. The problem is that we’re in the shadow of the libration. Alternative channels are out. We’re relying on LPCS; do you have any idea what’s going on?’

‘No.’ Dana shook her head. ‘At the moment we haven’t a clue. Not a clue. You?’

Aristarchus Plateau

The Moon was quite definitely more suited to route-marches than the Earth, because of its lower gravitation. Spacesuits quite definitely weren’t. Even though the exosuits provided a high level of comfort and mobility, you were, regardless of the air-conditioning, in an incubator. The more energy you expended, the more you sweated, and eight kilometres, even performing leaps that would have done credit to a kangaroo, remained eight kilometres.

Assailed by questions, Julian had divulged various things: he had talked about his nocturnal observation of the Lunar Express, about Hanna’s lies and dodges, and had told them something was under way against Orley Enterprises somewhere in the world. But the idea that terrorists might try to blow up his hotel with an atom bomb he kept to himself, just as he refrained from mentioning Lynn’s inexcusable derelictions of duty. He was terribly worried about her, but there was a great gulf of understanding in the mountain range of his concern, in which a horrible black worm of anxiety wriggled. Who had actually re-edited the video, who had hooked up Hanna? Because there was no doubt that the Canadian had been listening in earlier: he had gone into action even while that man Jericho had been setting out his suspicions! And finally, who had deactivated the satellites in perfect synchronisation with Hanna’s flight? The worm turned, glistened, quivered, and gave birth to the idea of an assistant, an accomplice in the hotel, male or female. Someone who had inexplicably refused to let him see the manipulated video, and whose attitude was becoming more mysterious with each passing hour.

‘And how are we going to get out of here?’ Evelyn wanted to know. ‘Back to the hotel, without a shuttle or radio contact?’

‘I’m just wondering where Carl’s trying to get to,’ Rogachev mused.

‘Like that matters right now,’ snorted Momoka.

‘Why was he in such a rush to get away? Nothing could have been pinned on him. Well, there’s the fact that he doesn’t stick too closely to the truth, but okay. Why the hurry?’

‘Maybe he’s planning something,’ said Amber. ‘Something he has to get done in time, now that his cover’s been blown.’

In time. That was it! How did the accomplice in the hotel manage to get away, if he existed at all? How acute was the danger of a bomb going off in Gaia within the next hour? Wouldn’t Hanna’s journey have had to take him back to Gaia, to set it off? Or was the bomb already ticking? In which case—

Lynn! He must have been crazy to suspect her! But even if she had some macabre, incomprehensible part in the drama, did she realise what she’d let herself in for? Did she have even the tiniest idea what was going on? Could Hanna have roped her in for his purposes, on some pretext or other? Could he have exploited her mental state, somehow hoodwinked her into doing things for him, the significance of which she completely misunderstood?

Perhaps he should have listened more closely to Tim.

Should have! The grammar of missed opportunities.

‘Julian?’

‘What?’

‘How are we going to get out of here?’ Evelyn asked again.

He hesitated. ‘Peter knows – he knew the Schröter spaceport better than I did. I don’t think there are any flying machines there, but there’s definitely a third moon-mobile. So we’ll get away in any event.’

‘But where to?’ asked Rogachev. ‘Crossing the Mare Imbrium in a moon car isn’t exactly an encouraging prospect.’

‘How far are we from the hotel, anyway?’ asked Amber.

‘About thirteen hundred kilometres.’

‘And how long will our oxygen hold out?’

‘Forget it,’ wheezed Momoka. ‘Certainly not long enough to get to the Vallis Alpina by car. What do you say, Julian? How long would it take to cover thirteen hundred kilometres at eighty max?’

‘Sixteen hours,’ said Julian. ‘But realistically we’ll hardly be able to go at eighty.’

‘Sixty?’

‘Maybe fifty.’

‘Oh, brilliant!’ laughed Momoka. ‘Then we can take bets on who packs up first. Us or the car.’

‘Stop it,’ said Amber.

‘My bet’s on us.’

‘This is pointless, Momoka. Why don’t we—’

‘Then the car will keep going for a while with our corpses inside, until eventually—’

‘Momoka!’ yelled Amber. ‘Shut. The. Fuck. Up!’

‘Right, that’s enough!’ Julian stopped and raised both hands. ‘I know we have a stack of terrible things to work out. Nothing makes any sense, practically no information is confirmed. At the moment the only thing we can do is think in a straight line, from one step to the next, and the next step will be an examination of the Schröter spaceport. We’ve got enough oxygen to do that.’ He paused. ‘Now that Peter’s dead—’

‘If he really is,’ said Evelyn.

‘As Peter is probably dead, I’ll take his place. Okay? Responsibility for the group lies with me now, and from this moment I only want to hear constructive comments.’

‘I’ve got a constructive comment,’ said Rogachev.

‘Great stuff, Oleg,’ sneered Momoka. ‘Constructive comments are at a premium right now.’

Rogachev ignored her. ‘Aren’t the helium-3 mines a bit closer to the Aristarchus Plateau than the hotel?’

‘That’s right,’ said Julian. ‘Not half as far.’

‘So if we could get there—’

‘The mines are automatic,’ Momoka objected. ‘Peter told me. It’s all robots.’

‘Okay,’ said Evelyn thoughtfully. ‘Even so, they must have some sort of infrastructure, don’t they? Accommodation for maintenance staff. Some means of transport.’

‘There’s definitely a survival depot,’ said Julian. ‘Good idea, Oleg. So let’s go!’

The fact that their oxygen wouldn’t get them to the mining zone he left unspoken.

Ganymede

Hanna hurried towards his goal on the hypothetical line of fifty degrees longitude, pulling the shadow of the Ganymede at a rate of 1200 kilometres an hour across the velvet monotony of the northern Oceanus Procellarum. His gaze rested on the controls. He couldn’t get any more speed out of the shuttle. He still had another hour and a quarter to go, but given the pitiful possibilities at Julian’s group’s disposal that was hardly cause for concern. Even if they managed to leave the plateau, he still had a luxurious amount of time to finish his task and leave the Moon. But whether Ebola would get there in time, now that everything was in chaos, was anybody’s guess. Admittedly he planned to wait as long as possible. But he would have to fly off sooner or later, alone if necessary. Those were the rules. Alliances served a purpose.

On his right there began a plain covered with tiny craters, which separated the northern Mare Imbrium from the Oceanus Procellarum. Behind it the helium-3 mining zone stretched into Sinus Iridum, the bay in which the Americans and the Chinese had got into such arguments the previous year. Kenny Xin had told him loads about that. Mad he might be, yet it was worth listening to him.

He looked wearily around.

The lock was bathed in a diffuse light. There was nothing to suggest that Locatelli had made it to the shuttle. And anyway, the noise of the bulkhead would give him away as soon as it opened. He turned his attention back to the controls and looked out of the window. A larger crater came into view, Mairan, as the holographic map on the console told him. The Ganymede had been travelling for a good twenty minutes now, and he was almost starting to feel something like boredom.

Okay then.

He stood up, grabbed his weapon with the non-explosive rounds and walked between the seats to the lock. The closer he got, the deeper he could see into the cabin, but at the moment it was actually empty. It was only when he was a couple of steps away that something massive and white entered his field of vision, something on the floor, and he stopped.

A survival backpack. At least that was what it looked like.

Did that mean Locatelli had actually done it?

He stepped slowly closer. Other details became visible, the shoulder of a piece of chest armour, a bent leg. It was only when he was standing so close to the glass that his breath condensed on it into a film of tiny droplets that he was also able to make out part of the face, a lifelessly staring eye, a half-open mouth. Locatelli seemed to be resting his back against the bulkhead, and he didn’t look particularly well, in fact he looked a bit dead.

Hanna’s fingers clutched the weapon. He rested his free hand on the sensor field, raised the bulkhead and took a step back.

Locatelli slumped out from the cabin like a sack and stared at the ceiling. His left arm weakly struck the floor, his fingers open as if he were begging for a final pittance. His right hand, still in the lock, was wrapped around the lower edge of his helmet. There was no outward sign of injury, and in any case he had been able to take off his armour before he collapsed.

Hanna frowned, leaned forward and paused.

At that moment he realised that something was wrong. The unusually healthy colour of the man’s face might be just about compatible with his being a corpse – but Warren Locatelli was definitely the first dead person he’d ever seen sweating.

So, Hanna.

Locatelli cried out. With all his might he swung the helmet, hit Hanna’s arm, saw the weapon flying away, leapt up.

Hanna staggered.

That the Canadian would see through his bluff and shoot him a moment later had been Locatelli’s worst-case expectation. So, two seconds after the attack, what surprised him most of all was that he was still alive. Countless times during the sequence of eternities that had passed since the shuttle lifted off, he had tried to imagine the situation and calculate his chances. Now here they were, and there was no longer any time to think, not even to wonder or catch his breath. Trusting, in the Celtic manner, to the effects of a good shout, loud and inarticulate like an attacking horde, he thrashed away at his opponent with his helmet, again and again, without a pause, without giving him the slightest opportunity to retreat, saw his knees bending, aimed at the top of his shaven head, struck again, as hard as he could. The Canadian made a grab for him. Locatelli dealt him a kick to the shoulder. God knew he had fought quite enough in his life, both often and enthusiastically, but never with a professional hitman, as Hanna plainly was when you looked at things with a lucid eye, so for the sake of certainty he brought the helmet down on his head once more, even though the man hadn’t moved a muscle for ages, grabbed for the curious weapon, staggered a few steps back and took aim.

Spurts of blood from the back of Hanna’s head, on the floor.

Locatelli’s hand was shaking.

After a while, quivering with fear, he risked stepping forward again, crouched down and held the barrel to Hanna’s temple. No reaction. The Canadian’s eyes were shut and his breathing was heavy. Locatelli blinked, felt his heartbeat gradually slowing down. Waited. Nothing happened. Went on waiting.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Gradually he was starting to believe that the man really was unconscious.

Where should he put him? He thought frantically. Perhaps he should chuck him in the lock and simply get rid of him on the flight. But that would have been murder, and even at his most reckless Locatelli was no murderer. And he wanted to know why Peter, Mimi and Marc had had to die, what Hanna’s crappy aims had been. He needed information, and anyway, Momoka, Julian, the others, were stuck on the Aristarchus Plateau! He had to get back and fetch them, that had absolute priority.

And how, smart-arse?

His gaze wandered to the cockpit. He knew how to drive a racing car, how to sail a yacht into the wind. But he hadn’t the faintest idea about Hornets, or about where the Ganymede was headed, how high and how fast it flew. Nothing on board was designed to lift his spirits. Here the Canadian, who would eventually come round, there the unfamiliar world of the cockpit. He hadn’t the first clue. He would have to learn, and fast.

No. First of all he had to put Hanna somewhere.

Nothing occurred to him even after he had gone on thinking for a few minutes longer, so he dragged the motionless body towards the cockpit, dumped it behind the co-pilot’s seat and looked around for something to tie it up with.

There didn’t seem to be anything like that on board either.

Right. At least no one could say things were getting boring.

London, Great Britain

One of the last works of the venerable Sir Norman Foster stood on the Isle of Dogs, a droplet-shaped peninsula in London’s East End. Bent into a U at this point, the Thames flowed around an area of business districts, elegantly restored docks, exclusive apartments and preserved remainders of social housing, whose traditional inhabitants were reduced to the status of extras in this affluent architectural idyll. As early as the 1990s, well-to-do Londoners had discovered the hidden charms of the area for themselves; artists, galleries, medium-sized companies had moved here to bear down on the crumbling working-class estates like so many pest controllers. After over two decades of violent social tensions, the last stretches of estate streets had now been lovingly restored, as if by museum curators, and the families living there had been made protected species, which meant turning them, with financial support, into the kind of happy social case that stressed managers were able to envy without drawing suspicions of cynicism.

In 2025 there was no one left on the Isle of Dogs who was still really poor. Certainly not in the shadow of the Big O.

The construction of the new headquarters of Orley Enterprises had begun even in Jericho’s day, the year before the fear of losing Joanna had sent him to Shanghai. In the south-east of the Isle of Dogs, in the former Island Gardens, resting on a low plinth – if you could call a twelve-storey complex low – was an O two hundred and fifty metres in diameter, circled parabolically by an artificial orange moon which contained several conference rooms and was reached via airy bridges. More than five thousand staff swarmed around the light-flooded atriums, gardens and open-plan offices of the big glass torus, busy as termites. A flight pad had been worked into the roof area so skilfully that the curve of the O was preserved from every perspective. Only as you approached it from the air did you notice that the zenith of the building was not arched but flat, a surface with two dozen helicopters and skymobiles arranged on it.

Tu’s jet had landed in Heathrow at a quarter past four. While it was still on the runway, the company’s security forces had welcomed them and brought them to the firm’s helicopter, which flew them straight to the Isle of Dogs. Further north stretched the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, vainly straining to be a match for the Big O, which towered over everything else in sight. Private boats, tiny and white, moved about on the waters of the renovated docks. Jericho saw two men stepping onto the landing pad. The helicopter turned in the air, settled on the pad and opened its side door. The men’s steps quickened. One, with black, wiry hair and a mono-brow, held his right hand out to Jericho, then reconsidered and held it out to Yoyo.

‘Andrew Norrington,’ he said. ‘Deputy head of security. Chen Yuyun, I assume.’

‘Just Yoyo.’ She shook his outstretched hand. ‘The honourable Tu Tian, Owen Jericho. Also very honourable.’

The other man coughed, wiped his palms on his trouser-legs and nodded at everyone.

‘Tom Merrick, information services.’

Jericho studied him. He was young, prematurely bald, and clearly afflicted with inhibitions that kept him from looking anyone in the eye for longer than a second.

‘Tom is our specialist in all kinds of communication and information transmission,’ said Norrington. ‘Did you bring the dossier?’

Instead of replying, Jericho held the tiny cube into the light.

‘Very good!’ Norrington nodded. ‘Come.’

The path led them inside the roof onto a grassy track and across a bridge, beyond which there stretched a bank of glass lifts. The eye was drawn down into the open interior of the Big O, criss-crossed by further bridges. People hurried busily back and forth across them. A good hundred and fifty metres below him, Jericho saw lift-like cabins travelling along the loop of the hollow. Then they stepped into one of the high-speed lifts, plunged towards the ground and through it, and stopped on sub-level 4. Norrington marched ahead of them. Without slowing his pace, he made for a reflective wall that opened silently, and they plunged into the world of high security, dominated by computer desks and monitor walls. Men and women spoke into headsets. Video conferences were under way. Tu straightened his glasses on the bridge of his nose, made some contented noises and craned his neck, transfixed by so much technology.

‘Our information centre,’ Norrington explained. ‘From here we stay in contact with Orley facilities everywhere in the world. We work according to the specifications of our subcontractors, which means that there are no continental heads, only security advisers to the individual subsidiaries, who report to London. All company data come together here.’

‘How far under the ground are we?’ asked Yoyo.

‘Not that far. Fifteen metres. We had a lot of problems with groundwater at first, but things are sorted out now. For understandable reasons we had to protect Central Security, avoid any kind of attacks from the air, for example, and if necessary the underground of the Big O serves as a nuclear bunker.’

‘That means that if England falls—’

‘—Orley will still be standing.’

‘The King is dead, long live the King.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Norrington smiled. ‘England isn’t going to fall. Our country is changing, we had to accept the disappearance of the red telephone boxes and the red buses, but the Royal Family is non-negotiable. If it comes to the crunch, we still have room for the King down here.’

He led them into a conference room with holographic screens running all the way around it. Two women stood in hushed conversation. Jericho recognised one of them straight away. The deep black pageboy cut over the pale face belonged to Edda Hoff. The other woman was plump, with appealing if grumpy features, blue-grey eyes and short, white hair.

‘Jennifer Shaw,’ she said.

In charge of Central Security, Jericho completed in his head. Guard dog number one in the global Orley empire. Hands were shaken again.

‘Coffee?’ asked Jennifer. ‘Water? Tea?’

‘Something.’ Tu had spotted a memory crystal reading device, and was making resolutely towards it. ‘Anything.’

‘Red wine,’ said Yoyo.

Jennifer raised an eyebrow. ‘Medium-bodied? Full-bodied? Barrel-aged?’

‘Something along the lines of a narcotic, if possible.’

‘Narcotic and anything,’ nodded Edda Hoff, went outside for a moment and came back in as the others were taking their seats. Tu put the crystal in the reader and nodded to everyone.

‘With your permission we’ll let an old rascal speak first,’ he said. ‘It is to him that you owe your glimpse into the sick brain of your enemies, and in any case I should like to sweep away any remaining doubts about our credibility.’

‘Where is the man now?’ Jennifer leaned back.

‘Dead,’ said Jericho. ‘He was murdered right in front of my eyes. They were trying to stop him passing on his knowledge.’

‘Plainly without success,’ said Jennifer. ‘How did you come into possession of the crystal?’

‘I stole his eye,’ said Yoyo. ‘His left one.’

Jennifer thought for a second.

‘Yes, you should baulk at nothing. Let your dead friend take the floor.’

‘The whole thing, erm, seems to be some sort of satellite breakdown,’ said Tom Merrick, the IT Security supervisor, after Vogelaar had evoked Armageddon under West Africa’s streaming sky. ‘At least that’s what it looks like.’

‘What else could it be?’ asked Jericho.

‘Right, that’s a bit complicated. First of all, satellites aren’t things that you can click on and off as you feel like it. You have to know their codes if you want to control them.’ Merrick’s gaze slipped away. ‘Okay, you can find out that kind of thing through espionage. You can knock out a communications satellite with directed data streams, for a few hours or a day, you can also destroy it with radiation, but what we have here is a total breakdown, you understand? We can’t contact either Gaia or Peary Base.’

‘Peary Base?’ echoed Tu. ‘The American moon base, right?’

‘Exactly. For that one all you’d need to do is black the LPCS, the lunar satellites, because of the libration, but—’

‘Libration?’ Yoyo looked blank.

‘The Moon seems to stand still,’ Norrington cut in before Merrick could reply. ‘But that’s an illusion. It does in fact rotate. Within one Earth rotation, it turns once on its own axis, with the effect that we always see the same side. That’s a thing called bound rotation, typical, by the way, of most of the moons in the solar system. However—’

‘Yes, yes!’ Merrick nodded impatiently. ‘You have to explain to them that the angular velocity with which the Moon circles a larger body, in terms of its own rotation—’

‘I think our guests would like you to keep it simpler, Tom. Basically the Moon, because of its rotation behaviour, wobbles slightly. As a result, we get to see more than half of the Moon’s surface, in fact it’s almost sixty per cent. Conversely, the marginal regions disappear at times.’

‘And they disappear from radio range,’ Merrick broke in. ‘Conventional radio requires visual contact, unless you have an atmosphere that reflects radio waves, but there isn’t one on the Moon. And at the moment the North Pole and Peary Base are in the libration shadow, so they can’t be reached directly from the Earth via radio waves. So the Moon has been equipped with ten satellites of its own, the Lunar Positioning and Communication System, LPCS for short, which circle one another within range of the base. We’re in constant contact with at least five of them, so we should be able to contact Peary, regardless of libration.’

‘And what’s to say that somebody hasn’t taken control of precisely those ten satellites?’

‘Nothing. That is to say, everything! You know how many satellites you would have to knock out to cut off the whole of the Moon from the Earth? Gaia doesn’t actually have a libration problem, it’s in visual range, so it can be reached at any time by TDRS satellites, even without LPCS. Except we no longer have a connection with Gaia either.’

‘So someone must be blocking—’

‘—terrestrial satellites too, yes, that’s one hell of a lot of codes, but yes, I think so. It’s just not a lot of use to them in the long term. They could attack TDRS headquarters in White Sands and paralyse all the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites at a stroke, but then we’d just switch to ground stations or civilian stations like Artemis, which are equipped with S-band transponders and pivotable antennae. How would anyone interfere with all of those?’

‘That’s precisely the problem,’ said Edda Hoff. ‘We’re in touch with every available ground station in the world. There’s no contact up there.’

‘After the breakdown of the conference system we immediately informed NASA and Orley Space in Washington,’ said Jennifer. ‘And of course the Mission Control Center in Houston, our own control centres on the Isla de las Estrellas and in Perth. Nothing but radio silence.’

‘And what could be the reason for that?’ Jericho rubbed the tip of his chin. ‘If not interference with the satellites?’

Merrick studied the lines in his right palm.

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘Are Peary Base and Gaia cut off from one another as well?’

‘Not necessarily.’ Norrington shook his head. ‘There’s a non-satellite laser connection between them.’

‘So if you got through to the base—’

‘Our message could be passed on to Gaia.’

Jennifer leaned forward. ‘Listen, Owen, I won’t deny that until a moment ago I had some doubts about whether the evidence you have points convincingly to a threat to Gaia. You three could have been a gang of hysterical fantasists.’

‘And what’s your opinion now?’ asked Tu.

‘I’m inclined to believe you. According to your file, the bomb has been dormant up there since April of last year. The opening of Gaia was actually planned for 2024, but the Moon crisis thwarted that one. So it would make sense to detonate the bomb now that it’s finished. As soon as we get a warning through to the hotel, someone sabotages our communication, another clue that it is going to happen, but above all that someone’s got their eye on us, during these very seconds. And that’s extremely worrying. On the one hand because it suggests that we have a mole in our ranks, on the other because it means that someone up there will try to get the bomb into Gaia and set it off, if they haven’t done so already.’

‘Listening to Vogelaar,’ Norrington said, ‘you’d see the Chinese everywhere.’

‘Not impossible.’ She paused. ‘But Julian already suspected someone before the connection was severed. A guest. In fact the guest, the last to join the group. The perpetrator might be known to us.’

‘Carl Hanna,’ said Norrington.

‘Carl Hanna.’ Jennifer nodded. ‘So please be so kind as to get hold of his papers for me. Screen the guy, I want to know what he had for breakfast! Edda, put me through to NASA and issue orders to the OSS. Our people or theirs need to send a shuttle to Gaia.’

Hoff hesitated. ‘If the OSS has capacity at the moment.’

‘I don’t care whether they have capacity. I just care that they do it. And straight away.’

Aristarchus Plateau, The Moon

The rover Julian had mentioned was parked in the dugout, but the second was stranded on the runway, scorched as if it had got in the way of a shuttle jet. All that remained of the third one, however, was a pile of junk. Debris lay scattered all around the place, so Momoka immediately set off in search of Locatelli’s remains. She scoured the area in grim silence. After that it was agreed that Locatelli wasn’t here, and nor was any part of him.

They all knew what that meant. Locatelli must have managed to get on board the shuttle.

They listlessly trawled through the hangars. Clearly the Schröter spaceport was still in the finishing stages. Everything suggested that airlocks and pressurised habitats were planned, so that people would be able to survive here for a while, but nowhere was there a sign of a life-support system. A cold room, for the preparation of foodstuffs, lay abandoned. The section of the hangar in which the moonmobile was parked was identified by inscriptions stating that grasshoppers should have been stored there, but there was no sign of one far or wide.

‘Well,’ Evelyn observed caustically, after glances into steel containers that should have contained spacesuits revealed nothing but a yawning void, ‘theoretically, at least, we’re in safety. The whole thing should just have happened four weeks later.’

‘Is the stupid moonmobile really all we’ve got?’ groaned Momoka.

‘No, we’ve got more than that,’ said Julian’s voice. He was walking through the next room with Amber and Rogachev. ‘You should come over here.’

‘Nothing that flies,’ he went on, ‘but a few things that drive. That burnt rover out there hasn’t got any prettier, but it does work. So along with the one in the hangar we’ve got two. And look what Amber has found: charged replacement batteries for both vehicles, and in the boot of the undamaged rover enough extra oxygen for two people.’

‘There are five of us,’ said Momoka. ‘Can we connect the tanks to our suits in alternation?’

‘Yeah, that’s fine. The supplies wouldn’t get you to Gaia, and the rovers would be worthless in the Alps. But whatever happens, our supplies will be enough to take us to the mining station.’

‘And does anyone know the way?’

Amber waved a stack of slides around. ‘These guys do.’

‘What,maps?’

‘They were in the rover.’

‘Oh, great!’ Momoka snorted. ‘Like Vasco da Gama! What sort of crap technology is that, when you can’t even program in your journey?’

‘The technology of a civilisation that increasingly confuses its achievements with magic,’ Rogachev coolly. ‘Or might it have escaped you that the satellite communication has gone down? No guidance system without LPCS.’

‘It hasn’t escaped me,’ said Momoka sulkily. ‘And incidentally, I’ve got a constructive remark as well.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘We can’t really make ourselves comfortable in this mining station, can we? I think we’ve got to make contact with the hotel, and that doesn’t seem to be happening at the moment because of the satellite strike. So how are we going to get to the hotel under our own power?’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘Are there any flying machines in the mining station?’

‘Maybe some grasshoppers.’

‘Yeah, those’ll get you around the Moon just fine, but at a snail’s pace. Except, if I remember correctly, the helium tanks are taken to the Pole by magnetic rail. Right? That means there’s a station there, and a train goes from there to Peary Base. And from Peary Base—’

Julian said nothing.

Of course, he thought. That might work. How obvious! Hard to believe, but just for a change Momoka really had come up with something constructive.

Ganymede

Locatelli stared at the control displays.

He had worked out by now that Hanna was taking his bearings from the holographic map, a kind of substitute LPCS. The outside cameras synched a real-time image of the visible area of the landscape with a 3D model in the computer into which you’d programmed your destination and route. That meant you could hold a steady course, practically on autopilot, because the system continually corrected itself, although that called for a high altitude. Locatelli guessed that Hanna had programmed in a destination that the controls were unable to tell him anything about. He would have bet that the Canadian was flying back to the hotel, but they were too far west for that. To get to Gaia he would have had to take a northeasterly course, and instead it looked as if he was stubbornly heading due north at fifty degrees longitude.

Was Hanna trying to get to the Pole?

Questions accumulated. Why did Hanna not use LPCS? How did you land a thing like that? How did you slow down? They were hurtling along at twelve hundred kilometres an hour, ten kilometres up, extremely worrying. How long would their fuel hold out if the jets had to constantly generate thrust in order to keep Ganymede at this altitude and accelerate at the same time?

He picked up his helmet and tried to make contact with Momoka via his suit connection. When he received no answer, he tried to get through to Julian and switched to conference reception. Nothing but atmospheric hiss. Perhaps the suit systems didn’t work at such distances. After all, they had been flying northwards for half an hour. Glancing at the map, he scanned the distances and reached the conclusion that there must by now be over five hundred kilometres between the shuttle and the Aristarchus Plateau. On the right, a considerable way off, a crater stood out in the middle of a plateau: Mairan, the map told him. Another, Louville, appeared over the edge of the horizon to the north. It was time to get to know the cockpit. It must at least be possible to contact the hotel from the Ganymede.

His eye fell on a diagram above the windscreen, which he hadn’t noticed until then. A simple set of instructions, but enough to get him to the main menu, and suddenly everything was much easier than he’d thought. Admittedly he still didn’t know how to fly the thing, but at least he knew how to work the radio. His disappointment was all the greater, then, when he still heard nothing but silence. At first he thought the radio mustn’t be working, but then at last he worked out that the satellites were out of operation.

So that was why Hanna had switched to map navigation.

At the same moment he understood why he couldn’t get through to anybody on conventional channels. Traditional radio meant that the partners had to be within visible range of each other, so that there was nothing between the transmitter and the receiver to absorb the radio waves, and in the case of the Moon the strong curvature quickly absorbed all contact. That was why his connection with Momoka and the others had been severed earlier on as well, because they had been on the other side of Snake Hill when the chase was taking place. Which was how he now knew the exact time of the satellite failure.

It coincided with Hanna’s escape.

Coincidence? Never in a million years! There was something bigger going on here.

Behind him, Hanna groaned quietly. Locatelli turned his head. After a long search he had finally found a few straps for lashing down cargo, and tied him to the front row of seats. You couldn’t exactly have claimed that he was trussed up like a parcel, but Hanna wouldn’t be able to free himself quickly enough to stop Locatelli shooting him in the leg with his own gun. He studied the murderer’s pale face for a moment, but the Canadian kept his eyes closed.

He turned back to the control panel. After a while he thought he had worked out various things, such as how to regulate the altitude of Ganymede, to make it climb or descend by—

That was it. Of course!

Locatelli was suddenly very excited. The Moon had no atmosphere, so in fact flight altitude couldn’t have anything to do with it, although of course it meant you were eating into your fuel supplies. It didn’t alter the general conditions, a vacuum was a vacuum. But the higher he climbed, the less noticeable the curvature became, until it was entirely irrelevant. As far as he remembered, only the Rupes Toscanelli Plateau stretched north-east of the Schröter Valley, with Snake Hill. If they weren’t cowering under the spurs of rock right now, but had fought their way through to the space station, he had to get through to them!

His fingers darted over the controls. The shuttle had a frightening number of jets, he established, some pointing stiffly downwards, others backwards, others still were on a pivot. He decided to ignore the pivotable ones, and switch thrust entirely to the vertical. He entered a value at random—

Suddenly the air was squeezed from his lungs.

Damn it! Too much, much too much! What sort of stupid bloody idiot was he! Why hadn’t he started with less? The idea of a calm flight was out of the window. The Ganymede shot upwards like mad, rattled, vibrated and bucked as if trying to shake him out of its innards. He quickly reduced the thrust, worked out that not all the jets were firing evenly, hence the vibrations, corrected, regulated, balanced, and the shuttle calmed down, continued climbing, now at a more moderate speed.

Good, Warren. Very good!

‘Locatelli to Orley,’ he shouted. ‘Momoka. Julian. Come in, please.’

All kinds of white noise emerged from the speakers, but nothing that even slightly resembled human articulation. The Ganymede was approaching the thirteen-kilometre mark. After its initial bickering, it allowed itself to be ridden like the most placid of ponies, climbing constantly higher, while Locatelli shouted Julian and Momoka’s names in turn.

Fourteen kilometres.

The landscape stretched below him. Again there was rattling and trembling, as the irritable automatic controls registered deviations from the longitudinal bearings and roughly compensated for them.

‘Locatelli to Orley. Julian! Momoka! Oleg, Evelyn. Can anybody hear me? Come in! Locatelli to—’

14.6 – 14.7 – 14.8

He gradually started to feel queasy, even though the rational part of his brain quickly reassured him that he could theoretically fly into outer space. All just a matter of fuel.

‘Momoka! Julian!’

15.4 – 15.5 – 15.6

Nothing.

‘Warren Locatelli to Orley. Come in please.’

Hiss. Crackle.

‘Locatelli to Orley. Julian! Momoka!’

‘Warren!’

Aristarchus Plateau

‘Warren! Warren! I’ve got Warren on the line!’

Momoka started to do a kind of St Vitus’ dance around the charred rover, whose bed they had started to load with batteries. They paused, all listening. His voice rang out with promising volume in their helmets, clear and distinct, as if he were standing right next to them.

‘Warren, darling, sweetie!’ cried Momoka. ‘Where are you? Sweetheart, oh my sweetheart! Are you okay?’

‘All fine. You?’

‘A few of us are missing, we don’t know exactly what happened. Peter, Mimi, Marc—’

‘Dead,’ said Locatelli.

Not that any confirmation was required. But the word fell like a blade and guillotined the unregenerate little optimist who had, until that moment, been tirelessly coming out with all kinds of murmured ifs and could-bes. There was a moment of hurt silence.

‘Where are you now?’ asked Julian, audibly chastened.

‘In the shuttle. Carl, the bastard, slung Peter into the gorge and then blew up Mimi and Marc, and then he hijacked the shuttle, but I managed to get on board.’

‘And where’s Carl?’

‘He’s unconscious. I knocked him out and tied him to the seats.’

‘You’re a hero,’ cried Momoka, delighted. ‘You know that? You’re a goddamn hero!’

‘Of course, what else? I’m a hero in a spaceship that’s going incredibly fast, with no idea of how to fly the stupid thing. That is, I’m getting the hang of it now. Turning round, getting down and landing, not so sure about.’

‘Can you get through to the hotel?’ asked Julian.

‘Don’t think so. Too far away, too many mountains. I’m over fifteen kilometres up, to be quite honest I’m starting to feel something like vertigo. And I don’t know how much gas I’ve got left.’

‘Fine, no problem. I’ll help. Just stay up there for the time being, because of the radio connection.’

‘The LPCS has failed, right?’

‘Sabotage, if you ask me. Did Carl actually say anything to you?’

‘I didn’t give him much of a chance to say anything.’

‘Oh, my hero!’

‘Do you know your position?’

‘Fifty degrees west, forty-six degrees north. On the right there’s a crater plateau, with mountains attached to it.’

‘Can you give me some kind of name?’

‘Wait a second: Montes Jura.’

‘Very good. Listen, Warren, you’ve got to—’

Ganymede

Locatelli listened carefully to Julian’s instructions. As he did so, he found himself suspecting that his host didn’t know what needed to be done down to the last detail either, but definitely had more of a notion about how to fly a Hornet shuttle than he did himself. For example, he knew how to take a bend. Locatelli would have adjusted the jets individually, and plunged to his death as a result. Whereas in fact it was relatively simple, if you bore in mind simple things like turning off the automatic course programming and switched to manual.

‘Keep to the right, fly east, towards the Montes Jura, and then make a big hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and head south again.’

‘I’m with you.’

‘Not even nearly. Don’t make any tight turns, okay? Make sure they’re wide. You’re going at 1200 kilometres an hour!’

Locatelli did as he was told. Perhaps he was an excessively obedient pupil, because the bend turned into an extended sightseeing tour of the landscape. When he had turned the Ganymede, he found himself to the west of forty degrees longitude, with the jagged agglomeration of the Jurassic mountains below him, arranged in a circle around a vast bay. The bay was called Sinus Iridum and adjoined the Mare Ibrium, and somehow the name struck him as familiar. Then he remembered. Sinus Iridum was the apple of discord that sparked the Moon crisis in 2024. From the windows of the cockpit he had a breathtaking view. Hardly anywhere else was the illusion of land and sea so perfect, all that was missing was a blue glow on the velvet basalt base of the Mare Ibrium. It looked particularly velvety here, most of all where it abutted the south-western foothills of the mountains.

‘Where are you?’ asked Julian.

‘Southern half of Sinus Iridum. There’s a spit of land ahead of me. Cape Hera-clides. Shall I go lower? Then I won’t have such a long journey down later on.’

‘Do that. We’ll just check how long the connection lasts.’

‘Fine. As soon as it goes, I’ll climb again.’

‘It’ll get more stable the closer you get, anyway.’

Locatelli hesitated. Going lower, fine. Perhaps it would be even better to cut back the speed a bit. Not much, just enough to take it below 1000 kilometres an hour. What he was doing wasn’t even slightly comparable to a flight through the Earth’s atmosphere, where you had to battle with air levels and turbulence, but hours upon hours in aeroplanes had got him used to lengthy landings, so he decelerated and began to drop.

The Ganymede plummeted like a stone towards the ground.

What had he done?

The shuttle settled at an angle. Noise flooded the interior, the tortured wails of over-extended technology.

‘Julian,’ he cried. ‘I’ve fucked up!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m crashing!’

‘What have you done? Tell me what you’ve done!’

Locatelli’s hands fluttered over the controls, uncertain about which fields they should press, which switches they should use.

‘I think I’ve got speed and altitude regulation mixed up.’

‘Okay. But don’t lose your head!’

‘I’m not losing my head!’ yelled Locatelli, about to lose his head.

‘Do the following. Just go—’

The line went dead. Shit, shit, shit! Fingers clawed, he crouched over the console. He didn’t know what to do, but to do nothing would mean certain death, so he had to do something, but what?

He tried to balance out his crooked angle with a counter-thrust.

The shuttle roared like a giant wounded animal, started reeling violently and tilted to the other side. A moment later it lurched so hard that Locatelli was afraid it would break into a thousand pieces. He looked helplessly in all directions, turned his head instinctively—

Carl Hanna was staring at him.

Hanna, whose fault it all was. Under any other circumstances Locatelli would have got up, smacked him one and given him valuable advice about how to treat your holiday acquaintances, but that was out of the question right now. He saw that the Canadian was starting to tug like mad on his fetters, ignored him and bent over the console again. The shuttle was rapidly losing velocity, and tilting still further. Locatelli decided not to worry about the plunge for the time being, and instead to concentrate on stabilising his position, but the only result of his efforts was that he suddenly had no power over the controls.

‘Warren, you—’

Hanna shouted something.

‘—you’ve gone into automatic! You’ve got to—’

Why didn’t that idiot just keep his trap shut?

‘—you’re out of manual! Warren, damn it to hell! Untie me.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘We’re both going to die!’

Locatelli poked stubbornly around in the main menu. The altitude meter was counting down worryingly quickly, 5.0 – 4.8 – 4.6, they were hurtling towards the lunar ground like a meteor. A few moments before, in his excitement, he must have pressed something, he must have activated some function that had effectively disem-powered him and stripped him of access to any kind of navigation. Now it looked as if he could do whatever he liked, and it would have not the slightest influence on the behaviour of the Ganymede.

‘Warren!’

Who was that this time?

Try and remember, do what you did before. What worked so well under Julian’s instructions. Turn off automatic pilot, switch to manual.

But how? How?

‘Release me, Warren!’

Why wasn’t it working this time? Bloody touchscreen! What kind of a crappy cockpit was it? Nothing but virtual fields, unfamiliar electronic landscapes, cryptic symbols instead of solid rocker switches with sensible inscriptions like HELLO, WARREN, TURN ME THE OTHER WAY AND IT’LL ALL BE FINE.

‘We’re going to die, Warren! That won’t do anybody any good. You can’t want that!’

‘Forget it, asshole.’

‘I won’t hurt you, you hear me? Just set me free!’

The ground, skewed at a forty-five-degree angle, was menacingly gaining presence; the range on his right-hand side stretched its peaks over the shuttle’s flight-path. As it grew closer, Sinus Iridum looked as if it were undergoing a weird and inexplicable transformation. In places the basalt plain seemed to be frozen in a process of decomposition, more mist than solid surface, with dark and mysterious phenomena in it. Little more than one kilometre separated the shuttle from the place where it was bound to crash. A vague blur turned into the line of the magnetic rail, and domes, antennae and scaffolding loomed out of it. Locatelli caught a quick glimpse of a collection of insectoid formations on an incline, and then they too were past, and they went on falling to their doom.

‘Warren, you stubborn idiot!’

The worst thing was, Hanna was right.

‘Fine!’

Cursing, he staggered from his seat, practically weightless, given the insane speed of their descent. Everything around him was rattling, vibrating and roaring. The floor was at such an extreme angle it was hardly possible to stand on it, except that he was floating anyway. Grabbing his gun, he made his way hand over hand towards the Canadian, crawled behind him and tugged at his bonds with his free hand.

Nothing. As if they were welded together.

Good work, Warren. Well done!

He would need both his hands. Such a bloody mess! Where should he put the gun? Wedge it under his arm, and quick! Don’t panic, now. Disentangle the knots, loosen them, untie them carefully. The straps slid down. Hanna stretched his arms, leapt up, grabbed the arm of the pilot’s seat and pulled himself into it. His eye fell on the console.

‘Thought so,’ Locatelli heard him say.

With some effort he heaved himself into the co-pilot’s seat. The Canadian ignored him. He worked with great concentration, gave a series of instructions and the Ganymede righted itself. Below them drifted an endless sea of dust, blurred fingers poked from it, reaching for them, stirred up by something vast and insect-like, creeping slowly across the plain. Locatelli held his breath. In the formless grey, huge, glistening beetles seemed to be moving around, then all of a sudden he felt as if his brain were being pushed out through his ears. Hanna violently braked the shuttle. Swathes of smoke whirled in front of the glass. They thundered along blindly, far too fast! A moment ago he had been ready to smash Hanna to a pulp, now he felt a powerful desire to see him at work, as the master of the situation. Sweat ran down Hanna’s face, the muscles of his jaw protruded. From the rear part of the Ganymede came a great bang that sounded like an explosion, even louder roaring, the nose of the shuttle rose—

Contact with the ground.

In a flash the landing-struts broke away. Locatelli was slung from his seat as if a giant had kicked the Ganymede in the belly. He performed a somersault and slid unimpeded to the rear. All the bones in his body seemed to want to switch places with each other. Jets hissing, the shuttle ploughed through the regolith, bounced, crashed down again, hurtled on, bucked, lurched, but the tail stayed firm. Locatelli reached desperately around for something he could hold onto. His hand closed on a stanchion. Muscles tensed, he drew himself up, lost his balance and was flying forwards when the hurtling wreck collided with something, reared up and scraped its way up a hill. Just as the machine came to rest in an avalanche of debris, he landed heavily between the seats, was carried on by his own momentum and bumped his head.

Everything around him turned red.

Then black.

Aristarchus Plateau

The brief moment of euphoria at the sound of Locatelli’s voice had made way for greater anxiety. Julian was uninterruptedly trying to get through to the Ganymede, but apart from a hiss nothing issued from the speakers.

‘Crashed,’ Momoka whispered, over and over again.

‘That needn’t mean anything,’ Evelyn said, trying to console her. ‘Nothing at all.

He must have got the thing under control, Momoka. He’s done it before.’

‘But he’s not in contact.’

‘Because he’s flying too low. He can’t get in contact.’

‘We’ll know in half an hour,’ said Rogachev calmly. ‘He should have arrived by then.’

‘That’s true.’ Amber sat down on the floor. ‘Let’s wait.’

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ said Julian. ‘If we wait too long we’ll use up too much oxygen. Then we won’t even get to the production sites.’

‘You mean we’re that low?’

‘Depends how you look at it. We could spare half an hour. But nothing must go wrong after that! And we don’t know whether the rovers will get through. We may find points where they can’t go on – we’ll have to factor in detours.’

‘Julian’s right,’ said Evelyn. ‘It’s too risky. We’ve just got one chance.’

‘But if Warren comes and we’re gone,’ Momoka wailed. ‘How’s he supposed to find us?’

‘Maybe we could leave something behind,’ Rogachev said after a brief, stumped pause.

‘A message?’

‘A sign,’ Amber suggested. ‘We could form an arrow out of the debris from the wrecked rover. So that he knows in which direction we’ve gone.’

‘Wait.’ Julian was thinking. ‘That’s not such a bad idea. And it occurs to me that our routes should actually cross. His last position was Cape Heraclides – that was the direction he was headed. And that’s exactly where we’ve got to get to. If we stay switched to receive, sooner or later he’ll make radio contact with us.’

‘You mean he—’ Momoka gulped. ‘He’s alive?’

‘Warren?’ Julian laughed. ‘Please! No one’s going to break him, no one knows that better than you. And anyway, those things aren’t that hard to fly.’

‘What if he had to do a crash landing?’

‘We’ll meet him on the way.’

They loaded up the rovers with the spare batteries and oxygen supplies, carried debris, empty shelves and containers out of the shacks and arranged them all into an arrow pointing north. On the right they formed an H and a 3 out of rocks.

‘Excellent,’ said Evelyn contentedly.

‘That’s what you call a detailed location,’ Amber agreed. A tiny hope was gradually forming. ‘At least it’ll help him find us.’

‘Yes, you’re right.’ All the arrogance had fled from Momoka’s voice. Now she only sounded terribly concerned and a tiny bit grateful. ‘That’s unmistakable.’

‘Then we should get going,’ urged Rogachev. ‘Suggestions about who should take which rover?’

‘Let Julian decide. He’s the boss.’

‘And the boss drives ahead,’ said Julian. ‘Along with Amber. We’re polite, too, and we’re going to let you guys have the nicer car.’

‘Hmm, then—’

It was strange. Even though they couldn’t survive here, each one of them felt the same ludicrous unease at leaving the spaceport. Perhaps because it looked like safety, even though it offered none. Now they would be heading for the desert. To no man’s land.

They stared at each other, without actually being able to see anyone’s face.

‘Come on,’ Julian decided at last. ‘Let’s get going.’

London, Great Britain

It was doubtless very sensible of Jennifer Shaw to have brought in people from Scotland Yard who, when the talk turned to Korean nuclear material, immediately informed the SIS. Since Orley Enterprises was based on British soil, and a non-British facility seemed to be involved, MI5 and MI6 were both let loose on the company. Jericho, on the other hand, felt as if they were running on the spot. Not because he missed Xin and the witch-hunt he had unleashed, but because all initiative seemed suddenly to have been taken out of his, Yoyo’s and Tu’s hands. The Big O swarmed with nothing but investigators that late afternoon. Jennifer insisted on having them there for every conversation, with the result that they droned out the same endless answers to the same endless questions, until Tu, red-faced with fury, under questioning from one of Her Majesty’s agents, demanded the return of his suitcase.

‘What’s up?’ Yoyo asked irritably.

‘Didn’t you hear the question?’ Tu pointed a fleshy finger at the officer, who impassively wrote something down in his tiny book.

‘Yes, I did,’ she said cautiously.

‘And?’

‘He really only—’

‘He’s insulting me! That guy insulted me!’

‘I only asked you why you dodged the German authorities,’ the agent said very calmly.

‘I didn’t dodge them!’ Tu snapped at him. ‘I never dodge anybody! But I do know which people I can trust, and police officers are rarely among them, very rarely.’

‘That doesn’t necessarily speak in your favour.’

‘It doesn’t?’

Edda Hoff’s waxy face showed signs of life.

‘Perhaps you should bear in mind that it is to Mr Tu and his companions that we owe evidence that your authorities for a long time failed to provide,’ she said in that special toneless voice of hers.

The man snapped the book shut.

‘Nonetheless, it would have been better for everyone if you’d only cooperated with our German colleagues from the start,’ he said. ‘Or did you have reasons for not wanting to?’

Tu jumped up and brought both fists down on the table.

‘What are you insinuating?’

‘Nothing, just—’

‘Who are you, in fact? The bloody Gestapo?’

‘Hey.’ Jericho took Tu by the shoulders and tried to pull him back into his chair, which was like trying to shift a parking meter. ‘No one’s insinuating anything. They have to check us out. Why don’t you just tell him—’

‘What, then, what?’ Tu stared at him. ‘That guy? Am I supposed to tell him how the police threw me about for six months of my life, so I still wake up drenched in sweat? So that I’m afraid to go to sleep because it might all start up again in my dreams?’

‘No, it’s just—’ Jericho paused. What had his friend just said?

‘Tian.’ Yoyo rested a hand on Tu’s fist.

‘No, I’ve had enough.’ Tu shook her off, escaped Jericho’s clutches and stomped away. ‘I want to go to a hotel. Right now! I want a break, I just want to be left in peace for an hour.’

‘You don’t need to go to a hotel,’ said Edda. ‘We have guest rooms in the Big O. I could have one prepared for you.’

‘Do that.’

The MI6 man set the book down on the table in front of him, and twisted around towards Tu as he headed for the door. ‘The questioning isn’t over yet. You can’t just—’

‘Yes I can,’ Tu said as he left. ‘If you really need an asshole to put under general suspicion, use your own.’

Jericho would have liked to ask Tu, otherwise so relaxed and controlled, and to whose house the Chinese police had paid regular visits only a few days before, what had provoked his rage to such an extent, but the nature of the investigations hurled him from one conversation into the next. His friend disappeared with a remarkably solicitous Edda Hoff, the MI6 investigator went on his way. For the few seconds that elapsed before the arrival of Jennifer Shaw, he felt a festering unease, particularly since Yoyo, the guardian of dark secrets, was staring ostentatiously into the distance, joining in with Tu’s misery.

‘And once again you know more than I do,’ he said.

She nodded mutely.

‘And it’s none of my business.’

‘It’s something I can’t tell you.’ Yoyo turned her head towards him. Her eyes glistened as if Tu’s outburst had caused new cracks in the dam of her self-control. It was slowly starting to seem to Jericho that the whole Chen family, along with their wealthy mentor, were on the edge of a nervous breakdown, in constant danger of exploding under the pressure of traumatic bulges. Whatever it was that troubled them, it was starting to get on his nerves.

‘I understand,’ he growled.

And he actually did understand. The phenomenon of being tongue-tied even when you wanted to speak was one that he was all too familiar with. He silently looked at his fingers, which were cracked, the nails jagged, the cuticles ragged. They were not attractive. He was clean, but not well looked after. Joanna had said that. For a long time he hadn’t been able to tell the difference, but at that moment he wouldn’t have been able to shake hands with himself. He neglected himself. Yoyo didn’t love herself, and the same went for Chen, and, to a startling extent, for Tu, the rock on which all egocentricity was founded. Were there any heads left in which the past wasn’t mouldering away?

Jennifer came into the room.

‘I heard you don’t feel like talking any more.’

‘Wrong.’ Yoyo rubbed her eyes. ‘We just don’t like people who don’t know our history sticking their great fat noses into it.’

‘SIS has finished stock-taking.’ Jennifer handed out thin piles of paper. ‘You’re credible, all three of you.’

‘Oh, thanks.’

‘Actually you could join your friend Tian. I’m very grateful to you, seriously!’ Her blue-green eyes said precisely that, and a tiny bit more.

‘But?’

‘I’d be even more grateful to you if you’d go on supporting our investigation.’

‘We’re happy to if you’ll let us,’ said Jericho.

‘Then I assume that’s resolved to our mutual satisfaction.’ Jennifer sat down. ‘You’re familiar with the coded message, you have been able to speculate in greater detail than we have about its missing parts, you have had contact with Kenny Xin, you know about Beijing’s involvement in African coups d’état, Korean mini-nukes, a conspiracy operating past all state institutions – would you like to hear something you don’t already know, for a change? Does the name Gerald Palstein mean anything to you?’

‘Palstein.’ Jericho scoured his memory. ‘Never heard of him.’

‘A chess piece. A rook, more of a queen, moved by circumstances. Palstein is the Strategic Planner for EMCO.’

‘EMCO the oil giant?’

‘The collapsing oil giant. Formerly number one among the companies following conservative paths that are currently perishing from an overdose of helium-3. Palstein’s task was supposed to be to save EMCO, and instead he has little more to do than cancel plans for exploration, close down one subsidiary after another and consign whole tribes to unemployment. In political terms not much is happening. It’s all the more remarkable that Palstein won’t admit defeat. In opposition to the senior board members, he took an interest in alternative energies years ago, and particularly in us. He would have liked to join us, but at the time EMCO thought we were working on things like time travel and teleporting. They didn’t take the whole business, helium-3, the space lift and so on, seriously, and when the reality of what we were doing finally kicked in no one took them seriously. But Palstein seems quite determined to win the battle.’

‘Sounds like Don Quixote?’

‘That would be to underestimate him. He isn’t one to tilt at windmills. Palstein knows that helium-3 is unbeatable, so he wants into the business. The only possible way is through us, and EMCO isn’t exactly broke yet. But a lot of people would rather see the remaining millions being put into protection for the workers. Palstein, on the other hand, maintains that the best protection is the continuing existence of the company, and says the money should be put into maintenance projects. Maybe that’s what earned him the rifle bullet.’

‘Just a moment.’ Jericho paused. ‘There was something about this on the web. An assassination attempt on an oil manager, that’s right! Last month in Canada. Nearly got him.’

‘It did get him, but fortunately only in the shoulder. A few days previously he and Julian negotiated EMCO participation in Orley Space. By that time it was already fixed that Palstein should go to the Moon for the unofficial opening of Gaia. He’d secured himself a place years ago, but with a gunshot wound, with your arm in a sling, you don’t fly to the Moon.’

‘I get it. Carl Hanna went instead. The guy that Orley suspects. The one you set Norrington on.’

Jennifer’s fingers slid over the tabletop. A man’s face appeared on the screen, angular, with heavy eyebrows, his beard and hair shorn almost to the skin.

‘Carl Hanna. A Canadian investor. At least that’s what he claims to be. Of course Norrington checked him out when they were assembling the group. Now, you don’t need to put people like Mukesh Nair and Oleg Rogachev under the microscope—’

‘Rogachev,’ Yoyo echoed.

Jennifer Shaw looked at the stack of printed pages. ‘I’ve put together a list for you, of the guests that Julian’s travelling with. You might be more familiar with some of the others. Finn O’Keefe, for example—’

‘The actor?’ Yoyo’s eyes sparkled. ‘Of course.’

‘Or Evelyn Chambers. Everybody knows America’s talk-show queen. Miranda Winter, always involved in some kind of scandal, darling of the tabloids; but the real money is with the investors. Most of them are well-known figures, but Hanna seemed like a blank page. A diplomat’s son, born in New Delhi, moved to Canada, studied Economics in Vancouver, Bachelor of Arts and Science. Entered the stock market and investment business, repeated stays in India. Worth an estimated fifteen billion dollars, after he inherited a lot of money and invested the money cleverly, in oil and gas, by the way, before switching to alternative energies at the right time. Remains involved in Warren Locatelli’s Lightyears, Marc Edwards’ Quantime Inc. and a number of other companies. By his own account he considered investing in helium-3 before, but he thought it was too much of a fly-by-night proposition at first.’

‘Although that’s changed, as we know.’

‘As have the indicators for an investment. A year and a half ago, at a sailing tournament organised by Locatelli, he met Julian and Lynn, Julian’s daughter. They liked each other, but what was crucial was that Hanna thought out loud about sponsoring India’s space programme because of his old associations with the place. The bait, you might say, that landed Julian like a big fat cod. The group going to the Moon had already been decided, so Julian offered him a trip for the following year.’ Jennifer paused. ‘You’re an experienced investigator, Owen. How much of Carl Hanna’s CV could be faked?’

‘All of it,’ said Jericho.

‘His business interests have been confirmed.’

‘Since when?’

‘Hanna joined Lightyears two years ago.’

‘Two years is nothing. Long periods abroad, possibly born abroad, standard spy stuff. In the emerging countries all our investigations trickle away, nobody’s surprised when birth certificates disappear. Sloppy work by local authorities is the order of the day. Second, investor. A disguise par excellence. Money has no personality, leaves no lasting impression. No one can prove who’s really invested or since when. With a bit of preparation you could pull something out of a hat and everyone will swear it’s a rabbit. Do you know him personally?’

‘Yep. Pleasant enough. Attentive, friendly, not exactly chatty. Bit of a loner.’

‘Hobbies? Bound to be something solitary.’

‘He dives.’

‘Diving. Mountain-climbing. Typical interests of private investigators and secret agents. You hardly need witnesses for either.’

‘Plays guitar.’

‘That fits. An instrument evokes the appearance of authenticity and creates sym pathy.’ Jericho rested his chin on his hands. ‘And now you think Palstein had to be sacrificed to make room for Hanna.’

‘I’m convinced of it.’

‘I’m not,’ Yoyo objected. ‘Couldn’t Hanna have been picked for your tour group if he’d just begged nicely? I mean, one more or less, you’re not going to shoot somebody for it.’

Jennifer shook her head.

‘It’s different with space travel. Where you’re going there are no natural resources, either to move you around or keep you alive. Every breath you take, every bite you eat, every sip of water is factored in. Every extra kilo on board a shuttle is reflected in fuel. Even the space lift is no exception. Once it’s full it’s full. In a vehicle that accelerates to twelve times the speed of sound, you don’t really want any standing room.’

‘What does Norrington have to say so far?’

‘Hmm. The CV looks watertight. He’s working on it.’

‘And you’re quite sure Hanna’s our man?’

Jennifer said nothing for a while.

‘Look, your late friend Vogelaar spouted a whole lot of hints. About China, the Zheng Group above all. The Russians used to be the bad guys, now it’s the Chinese. Should we be bothered that Hanna’s about as Chinese as a St Bernard dog? If Beijing really is behind the attack, they couldn’t do anything better than send up a European, everything signed and sealed, in our lift and with an invitation from Gaia. Someone who can move about freely up there. But, Owen, I’m sure that Hanna’s our man. Julian himself gave us confirmation of that before he got cut off.’

Yoyo glanced at the guest list and set it down again. ‘That means, the more we know about the attack on Palstein, the better we understand what’s happening on the Moon. So where is this guy based? Where is EMCO based? In America?’

‘In Dallas,’ said Jennifer. ‘Texas.’

‘Great. Seven – no, six hours behind. Our friend Palstein’s having lunch. Give him a call.’

Jennifer smiled. ‘That’s what I was just going to do.’

Dallas, Texas, USA

Palstein’s office was on the seventeenth floor of EMCO headquarters, close to several conference rooms which, like inadequately insulated basements, filled again every hour with the brackish water of bad news, every time it seemed just to have been emptied. The meeting in which he had now been stuck for over two hours was no exception. An exploratory project off the coast of Ecuador, at a depth of 3000 metres, launched as a blue-chip enterprise but now nothing but a rusting legacy. Two platforms, giving rise to the question whether they should be dragged to land or sunk, which hadn’t been that easy to answer in the wake of the legendary Brent Spar debacle.

His secretary came into the room.

‘Would it be possible for you to come to the phone for a moment?’

‘Is it important?’ Palstein asked with barely concealed gratitude at being temporarily removed from the ranks of the dead.

‘Orley Enterprises.’ She looked around with an encouraging smile. ‘Coffee, anyone? Espresso? Doughnuts?’

‘Subsidies,’ said an elderly man in a croaking voice. No one laughed. Palstein got to his feet.

‘Have you heard anything yet from Loreena Keowa?’ he asked as he left the room.

‘No.’

‘Right.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I guess she’ll be on the plane already.’

‘Shall I try her mobile?’

‘No, I think Loreena was going to take a later flight. She said something about getting in around twelve.’

‘Where?’

‘Vancouver.’

‘Thanks for that. You’ve just reinforced my certainty that I will keep my job for another while yet.’

He stared at her.

‘Twelve o’clock in Vancouver is two o’clock in Texas,’ she said.

‘I see!’ He laughed. ‘My goodness. What would I do without you?’

‘Exactly. Small conference room, video link.’

A tense-looking group appeared on the wall monitor. Jennifer Shaw, the security chief of Orley Enterprises, was sitting with a fair-haired, stubbly man and a remarkably pretty Asian girl at a battered-looking table.

‘Sorry to bother you, Gerald,’ she said.

‘Not sorry you did.’ He smiled and leaned, arms folded, against the edge of the desk. ‘Good to see you, Jennifer. I’m afraid I haven’t got much time at the moment.’

‘I know. We dragged you out of a meeting. Can I introduce you? Chen Yuyun—’

‘Yoyo,’ said Yoyo.

‘And Owen Jericho. Unfortunately the reason for my call is anything but welcome. However, it may illuminate some questions that you may have been asking yourself every day since Calgary.’

‘Calgary?’ Palstein frowned. ‘Let’s hear it.’

Jennifer told him about the chance of a nuclear attack on Gaia, and that someone had probably wanted him out of the way to make room for a terrorist in Julian’s tour group. Palstein’s thoughts wandered to Loreena.

Someone wanted to stop you doing something. It seems to me it was going to the Moon with Orley.

‘My God,’ he whispered. ‘That’s terrible.’

‘We need your help, Gerald.’ Jennifer leaned forward, grumpy, plump, a monument of mistrust. ‘We need all the picture evidence that the American and Canadian authorities hold about the attack on you, and any other information you might have, texts, state of the investigation. Of course we could take the official route, but you know the people involved in the investigation personally. It would be nice if you could speed up the process. Texas has a busy afternoon ahead, full of hard-working officials who might still be able to give us something today.’

‘Have you called in the British police?’

‘Special Branch, the Secret Intelligence Service. Of course we’ll immediately pass on the material to the State authorities, but as you can imagine my job description doesn’t just involve passing things on.’

‘I’ll do what I can.’ Palstein shook his head, visibly agitated. ‘Sorry, but this is all a big nightmare. The attempt on my life, and now this. It’s less than a week since I wished Julian a pleasant journey. We were going to sign contracts as soon as he got back.’

‘I know. Still no reason not to.’

‘Why would anyone want to destroy Gaia?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out, Gerald. And possibly, at the same time, who it was that shot you.’

‘Mr Palstein.’ The fair-haired man spoke for the first time. ‘I know you’ve been asked this a thousand times, but do you suspect anyone yourself?’

‘Well.’ Palstein sighed and rubbed his eyes. ‘Until a few days ago I would have sworn that someone was just venting his disappointment, Mr—’

‘Jericho.’

‘Mr Jericho.’ Palstein was already standing with one foot in the adjacent conference room. ‘We’ve had to fire an awful lot of people recently. Close down firms. You know what’s going on. But there are people who assume the same as you do. That the purpose of the attack was to keep me from flying to the Moon. Except that nobody’s been able to tell me why.’

‘Things are clearer now.’

‘Distinctly so. But these people – or one person, to be more precise – they don’t rule out Chinese interests being involved.’

Jennifer, Jericho and the girl exchanged glances.

‘And what leads these people to make their assumption?’

Palstein hesitated. ‘Listen, Jennifer, I’ve got to go back in, hard as it is. First I’ll make sure that you get hold of the material as quickly as possible. But there’s one area in which I’ll have to ask you to be patient.’

‘Which is that?’

‘There’s a film that possibly shows the man who shot me.’

‘What?’ Chen Yuyun sat bolt upright. ‘But that’s exactly what—’

‘And you’ll get it.’ Palstein raised both hands in a conciliatory manner. ‘Except that I’ve promised the person who found the film that I’d keep it under wraps for the time being. In a few hours I will call that person and ask them to release the video, and until then I ask for your understanding.’

The pretty Chinese girl stared at him.

‘We’ve been through quite a lot,’ she said quietly.

‘Me too.’ Palstein pointed at his shoulder. ‘But fairness dictates that sequence of events.’

‘Fine.’ Jennifer smiled. ‘Of course we’ll respect your decision.’

‘One last question,’ said Jericho.

‘Fire away.’

‘The man the person thinks is the murderer – can you make him out clearly?’

‘Pretty clearly, yes.’

‘And is he Chinese?’

‘Asian.’ Palstein fell silent for a moment. ‘Possibly Chinese. Yes. He’s probably Chinese.’

Cape Heraclides, Montes Jura, The Moon

Locatelli was amazed. He had reached a great insight, namely that his head was the Moon, his scalp the Moon’s surface, with the maria and the craters pulled over the concave bulge of the bone. From this he learned two things: one, why so much moon dust had trickled into his brain, and two, that the whole trip as he remembered it had never happened at all, but had sprung entirely from his imagination, particularly the regrettable last chapter. He would open his eyes, trusting to the comforting certainty that no one could reproach him for anything, and even the impression of constantly whirling grey would find a natural explanation. The only thing that still puzzled him was the part the universe played in the whole thing. That it was pressing against the right side of his face amazed and confused him, but since he only had to open his eyes—

It wasn’t the universe. It was the ground he was lying on.

Click, click.

He raised his head and gave a start. A circular saw was running through his head. Shapes, colours – all were a blur, all bathed in a diffuse light, at once dazzling and crepuscular, so that he had to shut his eyelids tight. A constant clicking sound reached him. He tried to raise a hand, without success. It was busy somewhere with the other one, they were both off behind his back and refused to be parted.

Click, click.

His vision cleared. A little way off he saw ungainly boots and something long that swung gently back and forth and bumped with the regularity of Chinese water torture against the edge of the pilot’s seat, on which the owner of the boots was crouching. Locatelli twisted his head and saw Carl Hanna, who was looking at him thoughtfully, his gun in his right hand, as if he had been sitting there for an eternity. He was rhythmically tapping the barrel against the seat.

Click, click.

Locatelli coughed.

‘Did we crash?’ he croaked.

Hanna went on looking at him and said nothing. Images merged to form memories. No, they had landed. A crash landing. They’d gone hurtling across the regolith and collided with something. From that point onwards he could remember only that they must have switched roles in the meantime, because he was now the one who was tied up. Seething shame welled up in him. He’d messed up.

Click, click.

‘Can you stop tapping that bloody thing against the chair?’ he groaned. ‘It’s really annoying.’

To his surprise Hanna actually did stop. He set the gun aside and rubbed the point of his chin.

‘And what will I do with you now?’ he asked.

It didn’t sound as if he really expected a constructive suggestion. Instead, there were undertones of resignation in his words, a hint of quiet regret that frightened Locatelli more than if Hanna had shouted at him.

‘Why don’t you just let me go?’ he suggested hoarsely.

The Canadian shook his head. ‘I can’t do that.’

‘Why not? What would be the alternative?’

‘Not to let you go.’

‘Shoot me down, then.’

‘I don’t know, Warren.’ Hanna shrugged. ‘Why do you have to act the hero on top of everything?’

‘I understand.’ Locatelli gulped. ‘So why didn’t you do that a long time ago? Or do you have some sort of quota? No more than three in a single day? You bastard!’ All of a sudden he saw the horses galloping away, with him running after them to catch them, because it probably wasn’t the best idea to annoy Hanna even more, but in the meltdown of his fury all his clear thoughts had vanished. He heaved himself up, managed to get into a seated position and glared with hatred at Hanna. ‘Do you actually enjoy this? Do you get off on killing people? What sort of a perverse piece of shit are you, Carl? You revolt me! What the hell are you doing here? What do you want from us?’

‘I’m doing my job.’

‘Your job? Was it your fucking job to push Peter into the gorge? To blow up Marc and Mimi? Is that your bloody job, you stupid idiot?’

Stop, Warren!

‘You fucker! You piece of shit!’

Stop it!

‘You fucking douche! Wait till I get my hands free.’

Oh, Warren. Stupid, too stupid! Why had he said that? Why hadn’t he just thought it? Hanna frowned, but it looked as if he hadn’t really been listening. His gaze wandered to the airlock, then suddenly he bent forward.

‘Now be careful, Warren. What I do has more to do with logging trees and drying marshes. You understand? Killing can be necessary, but my job consists not in destroying something, but in preserving or building something else. A house, an idea, a system: whatever you like.’

‘So what crappy system is legitimised through killing?’

‘All of them.’

‘You sick fuck. And for what system did you kill Mimi, Marc and Peter?’

‘Stop it, Warren. You’re not seriously trying to force a guilt complex on me?’

‘Are you working for some fucking government or other?’

‘In the end we’re all working for some fucking government or other.’ Hanna sat back with a sigh of forbearance. ‘Okay, I’ll tell you something. You remember the global economic crisis sixteen years ago? The whole world was gnashing its teeth. Including India. But there, the crisis also provoked a spike of activity! People invested in environmental protection, high tech, education and agriculture, relaxed the caste system, exported services and innovations, halved poverty. A billion and a half predominantly young, extremely motivated architects of globalisation pushed their way to third place in the global economy.’

Locatelli nodded, puzzled. He hadn’t the faintest notion why Hanna was telling him this, but it was better than being shot for want of conversational material.

‘Of course Washington wondered how to respond. For example they were troubled by the idea that a stronger India, if it got closer to Beijing, might forget about good old Uncle Sam. What bloc would crystallise out of that? India and the USA? Or India, China and Russia? Washington had always seen the Indians as important allies, and would have loved to use them against China, for example, but New Delhi was insisting on autonomy, and didn’t want to be talked round, let alone used, by anybody.’

‘What does all this have to do with us?’

‘In this phase, Warren, people like me were sent to the Subcontinent to make sure all the spin was going in the right direction. We were instructed to support the Indian miracle with all our might, but when the Chinese ambassador was blown up in 2014 by LeMGI, the League for a Muslim Greater India, Indo-Chinese relations darkened just at the right moment, favouring the finalisation of certain important Indo-American agreements.’

‘You are – hang on a second!’ Locatelli flashed his teeth. ‘You’re not trying to tell me—’

‘Yep. It’s thanks to some of these agreements, for example, that your solar collectors make such a huge profit on the Indian market.’

‘You’re a bloody CIA agent!’

Hanna gave a mildly complacent smile. ‘LeMGI was my idea. One of a huge number of tricks to offset the possibility of Chinese–Indian–Russian bloc formation. Some of those tricks worked, occasionally at the cost of human lives – our own, in fact. With all due respect for your genius, Warren, people like you get rich and influential under certain conditions that had to be put in place by other people, if necessary the bloody government. Can you rule out the possibility that your market leadership on the other side of the planet might have been bought with a few human lives?’

‘What?’ Locatelli exploded. ‘Are you off your head?’

‘Can you rule it out?’

‘I’m not the damned government! Of course I can—’

‘But you’re a beneficiary. You think I’m a bastard. But you only looked on while I did something that everybody does, and from which you profit every day without a thought. The paradigm shift in energy supply, aneutronic, clean fusion, that sounds good, really good, and the improved yield of your solar cells has revolutionised the market in solar panels. Congratulations. But when has anyone ever risen to the top without others falling? Sometimes you need a bit of help, and we’re the ones who provide it.’

Locatelli looked into Hanna’s eyes for the twitch that betrays the presence of lunacy, – tics, traumas and inner demons – but there was nothing but cold, dark calm.

‘And what does the CIA want from us?’ he asked.

‘The CIA? Nothing, as far as I know. I’m no longer part of the family. Until seven years ago I was paid by the State, but one day you realise that you can get the same job from the same people for three times the pay. All you have to do is go independent on the free market, and call your boss not Mr President, but Mr CEO. Of course you’ve always known that you were actually working for the Vatican, the Mafia, the banks, the energy cartels, the arms producers, the environmental lobby, the Rockefellers, Warren Buffets, Zheng Pang-Wangs and Julian Orleys of this world, so from now on you’re just working directly for them. It may of course happen that you go on representing the interests of some government or other. You just have to extend the concept of government appropriately: to groups like Orley Enterprises, which have accrued so much power that they are the government. The world is governed by companies and cartels, crossing all national boundaries. The overlaps with elected parliamentary governments are anywhere between random and complete. You never really know exactly who you’re working for, so you stop asking, because it doesn’t make any difference anyway.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Locatelli’s eyes threatened to pop from his head. ‘You don’t even know who you’re doing this for?’

‘I couldn’t tell you unequivocally, at any rate.’

‘But you’ve killed three people!’ Locatelli yelled. ‘You stupid arsehole, with your secret-agent attitude, you don’t do something like that just because it’s a job!’

Hanna opened his mouth, shut it again and ran his hand over his eyes as if to wipe away something ugly that he’d just seen.

‘Okay, it was a mistake. I shouldn’t have told you all that, I should be cleverer! It always ends up exactly the same, with somebody saying arsehole. Not that I’m insulted, it’s just all that wasted time. Annihilated capital.’

He got to his feet, grew to menacing, primeval height, two metres of muscle encased in steel-reinforced synthetic fibre, crowned by the cold intelligence of an analyst who has just lost his patience. Locatelli feverishly wondered how this ridiculous conversation could be held in check.

‘There was no need to kill Mimi and Marc,’ he said hastily. ‘You did that out of pure pleasure at least.’

Hanna shook his head thoughtfully.

‘You don’t understand, Warren. You know people like me from the movies, and you think we’re all psychopaths. But killing isn’t a pleasure or a burden. It’s an act of depersonalisation. You can’t see a person and a goal at the same time. Back in the Schröter Valley, those three were too close, even Mimi and Marc. Marc, for example, would have been able to climb back along the cantilever and follow me in the second rover, not to mention Peter. I couldn’t take any kind of risk.’

‘In that case why didn’t you just kill all of—’

‘Because I thought the rest of you were up on Snake Hill, and therefore too far away to be dangerous to me. Whether you believe me or not, Warren, I’m trying to spare lives.’

‘How comforting,’ Locatelli murmured.

‘But I hadn’t reckoned with you. Why were you suddenly there?’

‘I’d gone back.’

‘Why? You didn’t want to see the lovely view?’

‘Forgot my camera.’ His voice sounded awkward to his own ears, embarrassed and hurt. Hanna smiled sympathetically.

‘The most trivial things can change the course of your life,’ he said. ‘That’s how things are.’

Locatelli pursed his lips, stared at the tips of his boots and fought down an attack of hysterical laughter. There he sat, worrying about whether his confession of forgetfulness would be posthumously weighed against his actions, reducing his heroic status. Would it? At least there would be some kind of obituary! A stirring speech. A toast, a bit of music: Oh Danny Boy—

He looked up.

‘Why am I still alive, Carl? Aren’t you in a hurry? What’s all this game-playing about?’

Hanna looked at him from dark, unfathomable eyes.

‘I’m not playing games, Warren. I’m not treacherous enough for that. You were unconscious for over an hour. While you were out, I analysed our situation. Doesn’t look so great.’

‘Mine certainly doesn’t.’

‘Nor mine. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t able to get the thing off the ground at the last minute. We should really have been able to avoid the crash-landing with vertical counter-thrust. But the jets failed above the ground, when we were flying through those clouds of dust, perhaps they got blocked. Unfortunately, when we came down it knocked away our ground struts, so the Ganymede is lying on its belly, dug a fair way into the ground. I probably don’t need to tell you what that means.’

Locatelli threw his head back and closed his eyes.

‘We can’t get out,’ he said. ‘The airlock shaft won’t extend.’

‘A bit of a design flaw, if you ask my opinion. Installing the only portal on the underside.’

‘No emergency exit?’

‘Oh, there is: the freight-room in the tail. It can be vacuumed out and flooded with air, so in principle it’s an airlock too. The rear hatch can be lowered and extended into a ramp – but as I said, the Ganymede has ploughed several kilometres through the regolith, before clattering its way into a rock face over the last few metres. There are boulders lying around all over the place, as far as the eye can see. I think some of them are blocking the hatch. It won’t open more than half a metre.’

Locatelli thought about it. It was funny, in fact. Really funny.

‘Why are you surprised?’ he laughed hoarsely. ‘You’re in jail, Carl. Right where you belong.’

‘But so are you.’

‘So? Does it make any kind of difference whether you finish me off here or out there?’

‘Warren—’

‘It doesn’t matter. It couldn’t matter less! Welcome to prison.’

‘If I’d wanted to finish you off, you would never have come round. You understand? I don’t plan to finish you off.’

Locatelli hesitated. His laughter died away.

‘You really mean that?’

‘At the moment you aren’t any sort of threat to me. You’re not going to dupe me again like you did in the airlock. So you have the choice of being obstructive or cooperating.’

‘And what,’ Locatelli said slowly, ‘would my outlook be like if I chose to cooperate?’

‘Your temporary survival.’

‘But temporary isn’t enough.’

‘All I can offer. Or let’s say, if you play along, at least you won’t face any danger from me. I can promise you that much.’

Locatelli fell silent for a second.

‘Fine, then. I’m listening.’

Rover

Over the past half-hour Amber had given up all hope of ever reaching the production plant. Seen from a high altitude, the Aristarchus Plateau looked like a softly undulating picture-book landscape for lunar drivers, particularly along the Schröter Valley, where the terrain appeared to be entirely smooth, almost as if planed. But at ground level you got an idea of the day-to-day life of an ant. Everything grew into an obstacle. As effortlessly as the rovers were able to drive over smaller bumps and boulders in their path, thanks to their flexible axles, they proved more susceptible to the tiny craters, potholes and cracks that opened up in front of them, forcing them to navigate from one hindrance to the next at between twenty and thirty kilometres an hour. It was only once they were past a collection of bigger craters on the way towards the Oceanus Procellarum that the ground evened out and their progress became faster.

Since then, Amber had looked into the sky more and more often, in the hope of seeing the Ganymede appearing on the horizon, while her hope made way for the horrible certainty that Locatelli hadn’t made it. Momoka, who was driving the second rover, had lapsed into silence. No one was particularly talkative. Only after quite a long time did Amber speak to her father-in-law on a special frequency so that the others couldn’t listen in on the conversation.

‘You kept a few things to yourself back then.’

‘How do you work that out?’

‘Just a gut feeling.’ She scanned the horizon. ‘A little thing that tells women when men are lying or not telling the whole truth.’

‘That’s enough of your intuition.’

‘No, really. It’s just that women are more gifted at lying. We’ve perfected the repertoire of dissimulation – that’s why we can see the truth gleaming as if through fine silk when you lie. You talked about the possibility of an attack. On some Orley facility somewhere or other. Carl runs amok, communication fails, and in retrospect it becomes clear that he went behind your back two days ago and took a night-time joyride on the Lunar Express.’

‘And none of it makes any sense.’

‘No, it does. It makes sense if Carl’s the guy who’s supposed to carry out the attack.’

‘Here on the Moon?’

‘Don’t act like I’m retarded. Here on the Moon! Which would mean that it isn’t just some facility or other, but one in particular.’

They scooted on across the dark, monotonous basalt of the Oceanus Procellarum, already within the vicinity of the Mare Imbrium. For the first time they were able to take the rover up to its top speed, albeit at the cost of a very bumpy ride, as the chassis seesawed up and down and the vehicle kept lifting off the ground. In the distance, hills became visible, the Gruithuisen region, a chain of craters, mountains and extinct volcanic domes that stretched all the way to Cape Heraclides.

‘One more thing,’ said Julian. ‘Can I talk to you about Lynn?’

‘As long as it leads to an answer to my question, whenever you like.’

‘How does she seem to you?’

‘She’s got a problem.’

‘Tim’s always saying that.’

‘Given that he’s always saying it, you really don’t listen to him very often.’

‘Because he’s always going on at me! You know that. It’s impossible to say a sensible word about the girl to him!’

‘Perhaps because good sense hasn’t much to do with her condition.’

‘Then you tell me what her problem is.’

‘Her imagination, I would say.’

‘Oh, brilliant!’ snorted Julian. ‘If that were the case, I’d be inundated with problems.’

‘When the imagination overpowers reason, it’s always a kind of madness,’ Amber observed sententiously. ‘You’re a bit mad too, but you’re a special case. You distribute your madness to everybody with both hands, you cultivate it, people applaud you for it. You love your madness, and that’s why it loves you and enables you to save the world. Have you ever been troubled by the idea that you might have overstretched yourself?’

‘I worry about making wrong decisions.’

‘That’s not the same thing. I mean, do you ever feel anything like anxiety?’

‘Everyone gets frightened.’

‘Hang on there. Fear. Slight difference! Fear is the result of your startled reason, my dear Julian, it’s real, because it’s object-related and because it’s explained by concrete factors. We’re afraid of dogs, drunk Arsenal fans and possible changes to tax legislation. I’m talking about anxiety. The vague fog in which anything at all might be lurking. The anxiety that you might fail, that you might fall short, you might have misjudged yourself, that you might cause some sort of disaster, paralysing anxiety, the fear of yourself, in the end. Ever have that?’

‘Hmm.’ Julian fell silent for a moment. ‘Should I?’

‘No, what would be the point? You are who you are. But Lynn isn’t like that.’

‘She’s never said anything about anxiety.’

‘Wrong. You weren’t listening, because your ears were always full of adrenalin. Do you at least know what happened five years ago?’

‘I know she had a huge amount to do. My fault, perhaps. But I said take a rest, didn’t I? And she did. And after that she built the Stellar Island Hotel, the OSS Grand, Gaia, she was more efficient than ever. So if it’s exhaustion that you’re all making such a fuss about, then—’

‘We’re not making a fuss,’ Amber said, annoyed now. ‘And by the way, I was always the one who defended you to Tim, so much so that he’s been asking me if I get money for it. And every time I say, “Blessed are the ignorant.” Believe me, Julian, I’m on your side, I’ve always had a heart for slow-witted people, I can even see some lovable aspects in your boneheadedness; maybe that’s a product of social work. So I actually love you for not understanding the slightest thing, but that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way, does it? And you still haven’t worked out what’s going on.’

‘That’s enough.’

‘Just to remind you, it was you who wanted to talk to me about Lynn rather than answering my question.’

‘So explain to me what’s wrong with her.’

‘You want me to explain your daughter’s psyche to you, here in the middle of the Oceanus Procellarum?’

‘I’d be grateful for any attempt to do so.’

‘Oh my good God.’ She thought for a second. ‘Okay, then, the headlines: do you believe Lynn was suffering from exhaustion back then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you be surprised if I told you that overwork was the least of Lynn’s problems? Otherwise she could never have run Orley Travel or built your hotels. No, her problem is that as soon as she closes her eyes, mini-Lynns of every age start crowding in on her. Baby Lynns, child Lynns, teenager Lynns, daughter Lynns, Daddy’s-little-girl Lynns, who think they can only earn your recognition by becoming an even tougher cookie than you are. Lynn is absolutely terrified of this army from the past, which controls her day and night. She thinks control is everything. But she’s even more afraid of losing control, because she’s worried that something terrible might come to light, a Lynn who can’t exist, or perhaps even no Lynn at all, because the end of control would also mean the end of her existence. Do you understand?’

‘I’m not entirely sure,’ said Julian, like someone moving through a forest dotted with mantraps.

‘For Lynn, the idea of not having herself under control is more than frightening. For her, the loss of control basically means madness. She’s afraid of ending up like Crystal.’

‘You mean—’ He hesitated. ‘She’s afraid of going mad?’

‘Tim thinks that’s the case. He’s spent more time with her, he’s bound to know better, but I think, yes, that’s it exactly. Or it was five years ago.’

‘That’s what she’s afraid of?’

‘Afraid of failing, afraid of losing control and losing her mind. But what frightened her most were the terrible things she might be capable of in order to stay in control. By the way, did you know that suicide is also an act of control?’

‘Why are you talking about suicide now, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Come on, Julian.’ Amber sighed. ‘Because it’s all part of it. It doesn’t have to be physical suicide. I mean any act of self-destruction, destruction of your health, your existence, as soon as the fear of being exposed to destruction by outside forces becomes unbearable. You’d rather destroy yourself than let someone else do it. The ultimate act of control.’

‘And’ – Julian hesitated – ‘is it true that Lynn’s showing signs again, of – of this—’

‘At first I thought Tim was exaggerating. Now I think he’s right.’

‘But why don’t I see it? Why doesn’t something like that get through to me? Lynn has never shown me any weakness.’

‘So do you do that? Show weakness?’

‘I don’t know, Amber. I don’t think about things like that.’

‘Exactly. You don’t think. But nothing does any good, Julian. She doesn’t need time off to recover. She needs treatment. A long, very long course of treatment. At the end of that she may take over Orley Enterprises completely. But she might just paint flower paintings or grow hemp in Sri Lanka. Who knows who your daughter really is. She doesn’t know, at all events.’

Julian slowly breathed out.

‘Amber,’ he said. ‘There’s a chance that someone’s trying to blow Gaia up with an atom bomb. And that Lynn’s somehow involved.’

The revelation struck her with such force that she was momentarily lost for words. Her eyes drifted hopefully towards the sky, although she knew that Ganymede wouldn’t be coming.

‘How certain is it?’ she asked.

‘Pure speculation on the part of some people I don’t even know. And I don’t know anything more than that, I swear. But what happened today shows that there must be something in it. You’re right, Carl’s task might be to carry out the attack. And I fear – okay, there’s some evidence that someone on the Moon is helping him, and—’

‘You think it’s Lynn?’

‘I don’t want to believe that, but—’

‘Why, in God’s name? It’s her hotel. Why should she be involved in an attack on her own hotel?’

‘Perhaps she doesn’t know what’s really going on, but she didn’t want to show me the surveillance videos from the corridor which would have proved that Hanna was outside, travelling on the Lunar Express. She has access to all the systems in the hotel, Amber, she could interfere with the communications if she wanted, and she’s aggressive and strange, a mystery—’

‘And Tim’s in Gaia,’ whispered Amber.

Cape Heraclides

‘Right, listen to me. I’ve got to get out of here as quickly as possible.’

‘Fine.’

‘I’ve found a grasshopper in the storeroom, and a buggy. As to the hopper, I’m worried that the steering unit was damaged in the impact, but the buggy seems intact. That means we’ve got to get the rear hatch open.’

‘What happens if we can’t get out?’

‘We can get out. It won’t be entirely without danger, but if we put on our spacesuits and hold on tight at the right moment, I can get us out of the Ganymede. You’ll help me to shift the debris and drive the buggy out, then we’ll see how it goes.’

Locatelli blinked suspiciously. ‘If you’re trying to trick me, Carl, then you can do your shit on your own—’

‘If you’re trying to trick me, Warren, I will do my shit on my own – is that clear?’

‘Yes, it is.’ Locatelli nodded respectfully.

Hanna stuck the gun in a holster on his thigh, where it disappeared completely, knelt down behind him and quickly untied him. Locatelli stretched his arms. He was careful not to make any quick movements, extended his fingers, rubbed his wrists. It was only now that he noticed the slight angle of the shuttle. He still felt dazed. He hesitantly made his way to the cockpit and looked outside. Rising terrain stretched before his eyes. There was a fine haze in the air.

Air – what was he thinking of? It was dust, lousy, omnipresent moon dust, which hung like an optical illusion over the slope and settled, a dirty grey, on the glass. It wasn’t being held up by air molecules, so what was keeping the stuff up there?

‘Electrostatics,’ he mused.

‘The dust?’ Hanna joined him. ‘I wondered about that too. We’re very close to the production site, tons of regolith are dug up here. Still, it’s amazing that it doesn’t sink to the ground.’

‘No, I think it does,’ Locatelli guessed. ‘Most of it, anyway. Remember, when we were driving the buggy we stirred up loads of it. It all fell back straight away, apart from the really fine stuff, the microscopic particles.’

‘Never mind. Come on.’

They put on their helmets and body armour and established radio contact. Hanna directed Warren to the rear of the vehicle behind the last row of seats, and pointed to the line of backrests.

‘Set your back against them,’ he said. ‘To protect you. The panes in the cockpit must be made of armoured glass, so I’ll aim at one of the struts. The explosive power should be enough to crack them. Otherwise, we’ll have to expect a considerable amount of flying splinters. If we’re successful there’s going to be a hell of a draught, so stay in the lee of the seats and hold on tight.’

‘What about the oxygen? Won’t it go up in flames?’

‘No, the concentration’s the same as it is on Earth. Ready?’

Locatelli crouched behind the row of seats. In other circumstances he would have been splendidly amused, but even as it was he couldn’t complain about a lack of adrenalin release.

‘Ready,’ he said.

Hanna pushed in beside him, brought an almost identical-looking gun out of a holster on his other thigh, leaned into the central aisle and pointed the barrel into the cockpit. Locatelli thought he heard a high-frequency hiss, and then came a detonation, so short that the explosion seemed to swallow itself just as it was produced—

Then came the suction.

Objects, splinters and shards came flying from all directions, whirled wildly around, past him and towards the cockpit. Anything that wasn’t screwed or welded down was dragged outside. The escaping air pulled on his arms and legs, and pressed him against the seat-backs. Something struck his visor, indefinable things hit his shoulders and hips, a bat swarm of brochures and books came flying aggressively at them, covers flapping frantically. A volume suddenly clung to his chest armour, slid reluctantly along it, pages fluttering, broke away and disappeared down the aisle. Everything happened in complete silence.

Then it was over.

Was it really? Locatelli waited another few seconds. He slowly pulled himself up along the back of the seat and looked towards the cockpit. Where the front panes had been, a huge hole now gaped.

‘My goodness.’ He gasped for breath. ‘What is that thing you’re firing there?’

‘Homemade, secret.’ Hanna got up and stepped into the aisle. ‘Come on, we’ve got to get back to the storeroom.’

The storeroom looked less chaotic than Locatelli had expected. The individual parts of a grasshopper lay strewn over the floor. He picked them up, one by one. The steering unit had been partly destroyed, but the buggy was undamaged in its mountings – a small two-seater vehicle with a flat bed for cargo. Additional mountings indicated that if need be, six such vehicles could be transported. He quickly helped Hanna unfasten the buggy. The loading hatch, which was also the back wall of the storeroom, was slightly open, as if it had been dented in the impact. A hand’s breadth of starry sky gleamed in at them. Hanna walked over to a rolling wall, opened it, took out batteries and two survival backpacks and stuffed everything on the bed of the buggy. They left the cargo area and helped each other out of the hole in the cockpit. The ground lay some metres below them. Locatelli jumped nimbly down, rounded the nose of the beached Ganymede and, holding his breath, looked out across the plain.

It was a ghostly sight.

As far as the eye could see, areas of swirled-up regolith stretched across the Sinus Iridum to form the swirling shape of a bell. Where the dust became more permeable, the velvety nature of the background seemed to have made way for a darker consistency. A swathe of destruction led from the clouds of dust to the beach of the rising rocky terrain on which they stood, continued there as a jagged gap, described an upward curve and ended at the shuttle which, as Locatelli recognised now, had collided with an overhang and produced an avalanche. Boulders of all sizes had piled up around the tail of the Ganymede; some had rattled down the hill, but one of the biggest bits of rubble blocked the lower third of the rear hatch. The craggy ridge of the Jura Mountains ran to the north-west.

‘Not all that much,’ Hanna observed. ‘I was afraid the rubble would reach all the way up.’

‘No, it’s not much,’ Locatelli confirmed sourly. ‘It’s just that they’re bloody enormous. That one there must weigh several tonnes.’

‘Divided by six. Let’s get to work.’

Gaia, Vallis Alpina

At half past six, Dana called the search parties back to headquarters. Lynn and Sophie had scoured most of the staff accommodation and part of the suites in the thorax, Michio Funaki and Ashwini Anand had crept like cockroaches through the greenhouses, and had turned every scrap of green and every tomato upside down before devoting themselves to the meditation centre and the multi-religious church. The third team, last of all, was able to report that the pool, the health centre and the casino were, as Kokoschka put it, clean, stressing the word like Philip Marlowe after patting down a suspect.

‘And that’s exactly where the problem lies,’ said Dana. ‘In appearance. Have we had a chance to look inside the walls and floors? In the life-support systems?’

Kokoschka waved his detector tellingly. ‘Didn’t even click.’

‘Yes, of course, but we don’t know enough about mini-nukes.’

‘It was your idea to search the hotel,’ Lynn said furiously. ‘So don’t start telling us it was pointless. And besides, Sophie and I did look in the life-support systems, anywhere there might be room for such a thing.’

‘So?’ Dana stared at her with X-ray eyes. ‘How do you know how much room a mini-nuke takes up?’

‘That’s not fair, Dana,’ said Tim quietly.

‘I’m not being unfair in the slightest,’ she replied, without looking at him. ‘I’m concerned with minimising risks, and the search contributed to that. We’ve looked in the important places, I was in the head, even though I’m still of the view that there might be a bomb at some deeper, more central point.’

‘Or not,’ mused Anand. ‘It’s an atom bomb. The explosive force would be huge, so that it might not matter where you put it.’

‘It might not.’ Dana nodded slowly. ‘At any rate what I’ve heard doesn’t put my mind at rest. At least I was able to have a conversation with Peary Base. As I suspected, they’ve got the same problem, they’ve lost contact with the Earth and our shuttles, and they’re also in the libration shadow. After I told the deputy commander a short version of—’

‘What?’ Lynn exploded. ‘You told him what’s going on here?’

‘Calm down. I was—’

‘You told him about the bomb?’ Lynn jumped to her feet. ‘You’re not going to do that, do you hear me? We can’t afford that!’

‘—told the deputy commander—’

‘Not without my authorisation!’

‘—about the satellite failure,’ Dana said, very slightly louder, but with a voice that sounded as if she were sawing through a bone. ‘And told him we couldn’t get through to our guests. That was what we agreed, correct, Miss Orley? After that I wanted to know if he’d received any unusual news from Earth before the satellites failed. But he didn’t know anything.’

‘So you did tell him—’

‘No, I was just putting out feelers. And he didn’t have anything to say. The base is an American facility. If Jennifer Shaw had decided to tell Houston about the bomb in the meantime, she got there too late. At least too late to tell the base crew before the satellites went down. They don’t know anything about our problems over there, but I did take the opportunity to tell them of my concerns for the fate of the Ganymede. Against a background of a possible accident.’

Lynn’s gaze darted around the room and fixed itself on Tim.

‘We can’t run the risk of this getting out.’

‘If the Ganymede doesn’t reply soon, it will get out,’ said Dana. ‘Then we’ll have to ask the base to send a shuttle to the Aristarchus Plateau to take a look.’

‘No way! We mustn’t worry Julian’s guests.’

Oh, Lynn! Disastrous, disastrous. Tim resisted the impulse to rest his hand on her forearm like a nurse.

‘So what would you do?’ he asked quickly.

‘Perhaps—’ She kneaded her fingers, struggled for clarity. ‘First keep looking.’

‘The guests will be back in half an hour,’ said Funaki. ‘They’ll want their drinks.’

‘Let Axel take care of that. No, you, Michio. You’re the face of the bar. The rest of us will have to take our time. Stay calm. We’ll have to plan the next few steps calmly.’

‘I’m calm,’ said Dana blankly.

‘I’ll take another look at the surveillance videos,’ Sophie suggested. ‘From the night Hanna disappeared and the ones from the day after.’

‘What for?’ asked Kokoschka. Only now did Tim notice that the chef was staring steadily at the freckled German girl from his hungry St Bernard’s eyes, as if testing the quality of her cuts, loins, rump and breasts, and that his eyes darted furtively away every time she looked back. Aha, he thought, the cook’s in love.

‘Right.’ Sophie shrugged. ‘Whoever re-edited the recordings would have had to turn up in the control centre, right? I mean, he must have been captured on some camera or other. So if we can reconstruct—’

‘Good idea!’ Lynn cried exuberantly. ‘Very good! Carl and this – this second person. We’ll have to pump them.’

‘Pump them,’ echoed Dana.

‘Have you got a better suggestion?’ Lynn sneered.

‘But Hanna isn’t here.’

‘So? Julian will be here soon, and he’ll bring him with him. Why should we drive ourselves nuts until then? Let’s ask him, and besides’ – her eyes gleamed – ‘nothing can happen to us here as long as we keep Carl in Gaia! He’s hardly going to atomise himself.’

‘Course not,’ Kokoschka addressed his paunch. ‘Suicide bomber. Never heard of it.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lynn snapped. ‘Are you trying to provoke me?’

‘What?’ The chef recoiled and ran his hand nervously over his bald head. ‘No, I – sorry, I didn’t mean to—’

‘Does Carl Hanna look like an Islamist or something?’

‘No, sorry. Really.’

‘Then stop talking such rubbish!’

‘We – Our nerves are all a bit on edge.’

‘Didn’t you say the Chinese were behind it?’ Anand asked uncertainly.

‘This guy Jericho said that,’ Sophie replied.

‘How many Chinese Islamists are there?’ Funaki pondered.

‘Interesting question.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’ Dana raised her hands. ‘Enough. Christians have taken the shortcut to heaven too. Such rubbish! In my view Lynn’s just produced an argument that gives us a bit of time, as long as we can really lay our hands on this ominous second person. I think we should do as you suggested – Anand and Kokoschka will look behind the walls and floors, Sophie will watch the videos, Funaki will go down to the service section, Lynn and I—’

‘Gaia, please come in!’

Dana paused. They stared at each other. The system put through a wireless message. Seven pairs of eyes were filled with hope that the call might have come via satellite. Sophie leapt to her feet and glanced at the display.

‘Callisto, this is Gaia,’ she replied breathlessly.

‘Hungry crowd on the way!’ crowed Nina. ‘Do you see us? If there’s nothing on the table in five minutes, we’re going over to the Chinese.’

‘Fuck,’ whispered Dana. ‘They’re in range.’

Through the panorama window of the abdomen they saw the gleaming, sunlit shuttle in the sky. The Callisto had approached the hotel from behind and was flying in a final, athletic parabola. Every trip ritually ended with a fly-past above Gaia.

‘You couldn’t eat as much as we’ve cooked,’ Sophie twittered with frantic exuberance. ‘How was your day?’

‘Great! And we didn’t care a damn that you haven’t spoken to us for hours.’

‘We didn’t feel like talking to you.’

‘Seriously, what’s up?’

‘Satellite failure,’ said Sophie.

‘That’s what I was afraid of. We couldn’t get through to Julian either. Do you know what’s up?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Weird. How could all the satellites fail at the same time?’

‘You’ve probably rammed them accidentally. Stop chatting now, Nina, and bring your starvelings down.’

‘Oui, mon général!’

‘Then we’ll have them back,’ said Anand, looking around.

‘Yes.’ Dana watched after the Callisto until it disappeared beyond the window. ‘Plus the likelihood that one of them’s playing a dirty game with us. What do you think, Lynn? Shall we give them a welcome party?’

With some relief Tim registered that Dana had switched back to first names. A peace offering? Or just a tactic to lull Lynn into a false sense of security? He didn’t doubt that the hotel manager still suspected his sister of conspiracy, but Lynn visibly relaxed.

‘Not a word to the guests,’ she said.

‘Okay,’ Dana nodded. ‘For the time being. But once everyone’s there we’ll have to make a real job of it. Either Hanna and his gang give it to us straight, or we inform the base and evacuate the hotel.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘Let’s give the Ganymede another hour.’

‘What makes you think the Ganymede needs another hour?’

Lynn’s really lost touch with reality, thought Tim. Or else she’s playing the dirty game.

Error! Unauthorised thought.

‘Whatever,’ said Dana. ‘Let’s go.’

Calgary to Vancouver, Canada

‘Believe me, I’ve really scoured the net,’ said the intern. ‘I can’t offer you anything more than I did last night.’

The Westjet Airlines Boeing 737 plummeted in an air pocket. A hundred millilitres of orange juice sluiced from the cup as Loreena took off the tinfoil lid, spraying over her jacket and drenching her croissant.

‘Shit!’she cursed.

‘Gudmundsson’s time at APS—’

‘Shit! Fucking shit!’ Juice dripped from the tray into her lap. ‘Who was APS again?’

‘African Protection Services.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘So, before Gudmundsson’s time at APS, there was this period with Mamba, the other security company that was in operation in Kenya and Nigeria at the start of the millennium, which merged with a similar kind of crowd called Armed African Services to form APS in 2010. Gudmundsson led various teams—’

‘You told me that yesterday,’ said Loreena, trying to use her tiny paper napkin economically.

‘—and was involved in operations in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. Are you going to eat that?’

‘What?’

‘The croissant. It looks pretty awful, if you ask me.’

Loreena glanced at the dripping pastry. Previously it had just been floppy, now it was floppy and wet.

‘No way.’

The intern lunged across and stuck half of it in his mouth.

‘Here and there we find clues that APS helped some bush dictator or other to force his way into power,’ he said, chewing. ‘APS always denied it, but there seems to be something in it. So Gudmundsson might have been involved in a coup before he left the company to go freelance. APS was now run by a guy called Jan Kees Vogelaar, who was also a high-up in Mamba. Incidentally, Vogelaar then became a member of the government in Equatorial Guinea, that’s where the coup took pl—’

‘Forget it.’

‘You wanted me to look into Gudmundsson’s background,’ the intern said, insulted.

‘Yes, his, not some guy called Fogelhair or whatever his name is.’ She dabbed orange juice from her trouser legs. ‘Is there nothing about what he did three years ago, whether he was in Peru or somewhere? I thought they were all pretty forthcoming at Eagle Eye.’

‘Patience, Pocahontas. I’m working on it.’

Loreena looked out of the window. Their flight was taking them over the Rocky Mountains. Short but turbulent. The Boeing shook. She drank the rest of the juice down and said, ‘I want to give Susan as many facts as I can, you understand? She’s got to work out that we can’t get out of this one. We’re in it up to our necks.’

‘Hmyeah.’ The second half of the croissant joined the first. ‘Supposing Ruiz really does have something to do with Palstein. All you’ve got at the moment is a suspicion.’

‘I have my instinct.’

‘Indian bullshit.’

‘Just wait. And could you stop nattering until you’ve swallowed? That thing doesn’t look any prettier in your oral cavity.’

‘Oh, God,’ sighed the intern. ‘You’ve really got problems.’

Loreena looked outside again. The jagged ridges of the Rockies were passing far below her. The intern had meant something quite different, but what he said reminded her of Palstein’s worried glance from the previous day. That she was smilingly preparing her own downfall. That she would have problems if she went on lifting up stones with creatures like Lars Gudmundsson lurking underneath them. And? Had Woodward and Bernstein been intimidated by the creepy-crawlies that Nixon threw at them? Palstein’s anxiety was valid; Susan’s worries irritated her. Was that a reason to throw away their chance to solve their own Watergate conspiracy?

Good intentions are useless, she thought. Courage can’t be bought. Mine certainly can’t.

After a while she dictated the facts of her research so far into her mobile phone, let the software turn her spoken words into writing, attached Bruford’s film material and sent the dossier to both their email addresses.

Better safe than sorry.

They passed through the turbulence.

Three-quarters of an hour later the plane came down towards the foothills of the Coast Mountains and began its descent towards Vancouver International Airport. The weather was fine. Little white clouds drifted inland, sunlight glittered on the Strait of Georgia. The dark wooded body of Vancouver Island evoked Indian myths and the scent of arbor vitae and Douglas firs. As they came down, Loreena’s mood lifted, because they had actually found out a hell of a lot over the previous few days. Perhaps they should settle for what they knew about Gudmundsson, and instead concentrate all their resources on researching the background to the ominous conference in Beijing. As the Boeing taxied to a standstill, she drew up a strategically sensible procedure for the imminent editorial conference, whereby she would act at first as if Palstein’s name had never been mentioned. Put up a smokescreen around Susan. Enthusiastically address the topic of Trash of the Titans, show them her treatment, prove that they were taking their homework seriously. Then deliver their royal flush with the photograph of the fat Asian guy. Well, maybe not a royal flush. But she was perfectly willing to call what they had a full house.

‘I just hope Sid’s on time,’ said the intern as they walked through the terminal with the woodcuts of the First Nations. ‘Actually he’s never on time.’

‘Then we’ll just wait a few minutes,’ she hummed cheerfully.

‘But I’m hungry. Can’t we go to McDonald’s first?’

‘Tell your stomach—’

‘Fine.’

But Sid Holland, Greenwatch’s political history editor, was unusually bang on time. He had an ancient, souped-up Thunderbird, in the four-seater open-top version, and loved the car so much that he would gladly have driven half the editorial team through the district just to have a ride in it.

‘Susan’s looking forward to it,’ he said. ‘She hopes you’ve got something about Trash of the Titans in your bag.’

‘Is there any breakfast?’ asked the intern.

‘Dude, it’s half past eleven!’

‘Lunch?’

Loreena looked into the azure-blue sky as the intern climbed into the back seat, and thought of her Pulitzer Prize. Sid drove the car from the airport island across the Arthur Laing Bridge and in a north-westerly direction through the neighbourhoods of Marpole, Kerrisdale and Dunbar Southlands. Past the end of the built-up areas the Pacific Spirit Regional Park began. Southwest Marine Drive, the four-lane feeder road, ran along the coast through dense vegetation towards the grounds of the university at Point Grey, far more than a classical campus, almost a small unincorporated city with a smart adjacent district of extremely Canadian-looking houses and well-tended villas. Thanks to the power of viewing figures, Greenwatch was able to live in one of the villas. Studios and editing suites were decentralised, most of the staff scattered around Canada and Alaska, so that all that remained in Point Grey were the offices of the supreme command and some stylish conference rooms. It was down to Loreena’s influence that good conscience was able to unfold in elegant surroundings.

Things would go even better for Greenwatch.

The traffic was moderate, there weren’t many cars about on Marine Drive. On their left the forest opened up, providing a view of a still sea and far-off, pastel-coloured mountain ranges. Hundreds of tree trunks made into rafts rested in the shallow water, evidence that the timber industry was still flourishing in spite of massive deforestation. Loreena closed her eyes and enjoyed the airstream. When she opened her eyes again, she glanced into the wing mirror.

An SUV was driving close behind them, a massive, grey off-road vehicle with darkened windows.

Suddenly she was overcome by a feeling of unease.

She wondered how often she had looked into her wing mirror over the past quarter of an hour. Probably all the time, without being aware of it. Loreena was a super-alert passenger, and her constant shouts of ‘Red!’ and ‘When’s it going to turn green?’ and ‘Watch where you’re driving!’ got on some people’s nerves. Nothing escaped her. Not even who was driving behind them.

Frowning, she turned her head.

The feeling condensed into certainty. Now she was completely sure that the SUV had been tailgating them ever since the airport. The windscreen reflected the sky, so that the two occupants could only be made out very vaguely. She looked thoughtfully ahead again. The road ran evenly through luxuriant green, divided along the middle by a yellowing strip of grass on which bushes and low trees were planted at irregular intervals. Another off-road vehicle was coming towards them, equally dark, a different one.

Was she going mad? Was she developing a peculiar little paranoid fantasy? How many dark SUVs were there in Vancouver? Hundreds, certainly. Thousands. To western Canadians off-road vehicles were something like seashells to hermit crabs.

Stop thinking this stuff, she thought.

On the other hand it couldn’t hurt if she jotted down the number of the car. She took out her mobile phone as the SUV suddenly switched lanes and pulled up level with them so that she couldn’t see the number plate any more. Loreena knitted her brows. Fool, she thought. Couldn’t you wait another few seconds? I was about to give you my—

The SUV came closer.

‘Hey!’ Sid honked his horn and gesticulated towards the other vehicle. ‘Keep your eye on the road, you idiot!’

Still closer.

‘What’s up with him?’ barked Sid. ‘Is he drunk?’

No, thought Loreena, filled with sudden unease, no one’s drunk around here. Someone knows exactly what he’s doing.

Sid accelerated. So did the SUV.

‘What a stupid idiot!’ he raged. ‘That guy ought to—’

‘Careful!’ yelled the intern.

Loreena saw the huge car coming, settled into her seatbelt, tried to put some distance between herself and the door, then the SUV collided with the side of the Thunderbird and forced it into the central reservation. Sid cursed and pulled the wheel round, frantically trying not to end up in the opposite lane. Veering wildly they ploughed through soil, brushed past low bushes, just missed a tree. The engine of the sports car wailed. Sid put his foot down. The SUV drew up and rammed them again, harder this time. Loreena lurched about in her seat. The metal screech of punished metal echoed in her aural passages, and suddenly they were on the opposite lane, they heard furious honking, swerved at the last moment.

‘My car!’ wailed Sid. ‘My lovely car!’

Grim-faced, he steered the Thunderbird back onto the strip of green, but in that section someone had placed greater emphasis on bushes. They plunged noisily into a hedge. Branches flew off in all directions as the sports car crashed through several different varieties of shrub. On the right-hand side the SUV dashed along and blocked their way back onto the carriageway. Sid braked abruptly and tried to get behind the SUV, which thwarted his intention by also decelerating.

At that very moment he hurtled forward again.

This time Sid was quicker. Neatly avoiding a collision, he crossed the two opposite lanes and only just managed to dodge a motorcycle and turn into Old Marine Drive, a narrow, potholed street that led a few kilometres along the woods to the university grounds, where it opened back into the main road. There was no one to be seen for miles around; dense, dark green proliferated on both sides. Loreena registered that her seatbelt had been torn from its moorings, and clutched the edge of the windscreen.

My God, she thought. What do they want from us?

Oddly, it didn’t occur to her that the attack might have anything to do with Palstein, Ruiz and the whole story. She thought instead of juvenile delinquents, carjackers or someone who did that kind of thing just for fun, who must be completely insane. She looked behind her. Potholes, woods, nothing else. For a moment she was surviving on the tender shoot of hope that Sid might have shaken off his pursuer with his manoeuvre, when he appeared behind them and came relentlessly closer.

A scraping noise emerged from the Thunderbird’s engine compartment. The car stuttered.

‘Faster!’ she screamed.

‘I’m driving as fast as I can,’ Sid yelled back. Instead they were losing speed, growing steadily slower.

‘You must be able to go faster!’

‘I don’t know what’s going on.’ Sid let go of the wheel and waved his hands around in the air. ‘Something’s fucked, no idea what.’

‘Hands on the wheel!’

‘Oh God almighty,’ groaned the intern and ducked his head. The massive, dark front of the SUV roared up and crashed into them from behind. The Thunderbird gave a leap. Loreena was slung forward and bumped her head.

‘Come on!’ Sid pleaded with the car. ‘Come on!’

Once again the SUV hammered into their rear. The Thunderbird made unhealthy noises, then their attacker was suddenly beside them, pushing them easily aside. Sid cursed, steered like crazy in the opposite direction, put his foot down, braked—

Lost control.

The moment of lift-off had the entirely curious effect that at the same moment every sound – not only that of the tyres on the gravel of the carriageway, but also the sounds of the engine, of the SUV – seemed to die away, apart from the single, bubbling call of a bird. They turned over and over in peaceful silence, the trees grew momentarily down from the sky towards them, bushy clouds sprinkled an endless blue sea of unfathomable depth, then there was a change of perspective, the wood was at an angle, a roaring and scraping, and everything was back, the whole terrifying cacophony of the crash. Loreena was hurled from her seat. Arms flailing, she sailed through the air, while below her the Thunderbird skidded down the embankment, undercarriage towards her, tyres spinning, an animal devouring bushes and foliage. Still flying, she became aware of the wreck abruptly reaching a standstill and coming to rest, then a piece of meadow came rushing towards her at breakneck speed.

She had no idea what exactly she broke as she landed, but judging by the pain the damage must have been considerable. Her body was slung around several times, onto her back, onto her belly, onto her side. What wasn’t broken broke now. At last, after what seemed like an eternity, she lay there, limbs outstretched, blood in her eyes, blood in her mouth.

Her first thought was that she was still alive.

Her second, that her phone was flashing in the sun not very far away. It sparkled on a flat stone like an exhibition piece, right in the middle, as if lovingly placed there. Further down lay the shattered Thunderbird in the trellis of broken trees, scattered with twigs, bark and leaves, and in the car, in fact more out than in, Sid dangled, his head half torn from his shoulders, staring at her.

Tyres approached across gravel and grass.

‘Loreena?’

The cry reached her, thin and plaintive. She raised her eyes and saw the intern lying in the shadow of a fir tree. He tried to prop himself up, collapsed, tried again. The SUV stopped. Someone came down the embankment with long, not particularly hurried steps. A man, tall, dark trousers, white shirt, sunglasses. He casually held a long-barrelled pistol in his right hand.

‘I’ll be right with you,’ he said. ‘Just a moment.’

Silencer, the thought ran through her head.

He smiled in a rather businesslike manner as he walked past her, stepped up to the intern and fired three shots at him, until the boy stopped moving. It went pop, pop, pop. Loreena opened her mouth because she wanted to scream, to wail, to call for help, but only an ebbing sigh escaped her chest. Every breath was torture. She struggled forwards, propped her elbows in the grass and crawled towards the stone with the phone on it.

The man came back, picked it up and put it in his pocket.

She gave up. Rolled onto her back, blinked into the sun and thought how right Palstein had been. How close they had been, how bloody close! Lars Gudmundsson’s head and torso entered her field of vision, the muzzle of his pistol.

‘You’re very clever,’ he said. ‘A very clever woman.’

‘I know,’ groaned Loreena.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all – it’s all on the net,’ she murmured. ‘It’s all—’

‘We’ll check that,’ he said in a friendly voice, and pulled the trigger.

Gaia, Vallis Alpina, The Moon

Nina Hedegaard tried to catch a thousand birds as she sweated away in the Finnish sauna, in a state of mounting frustration. Everywhere she saw the peacock plumage of affluence, heard a twittering exchange about nests and young, and imagined that carefree daydreaming that was only possible in Julian’s world. A thousand wonderful, wildly fluttering thoughts. But Julian wasn’t there, and the birds refused to be lured into the pen of her life-plans. Whenever she thought she was holding at least a sparrow, after Julian had murmured something that sounded halfway authoritative in her ear, even that little hope escaped and joined all the other ideas, enticingly close and at the same time unattainably far off, of her inflamed imagination. By now she had serious doubts about Julian’s honesty. As if he didn’t know full well that she had hopes. Why couldn’t he confess openly to her? Did he have an act of adultery to conceal, social ostracism to fight against? Not a bit of it; he was single, just as she was single, good-looking and lovable single, not rich, perhaps, but then he was rich himself, so what was the problem?

Her frustration seeped like dew from every pore, collected on her forearms, breasts and belly. She furiously distributed layer after layer of warm sweat, let her hands circle around her inner thighs, her fingers working their way slowly to the middle, settling in her crotch, twitching, untameable, abject, pleasure-seeking digits. Shocking! Along with her fury, she was seized with a furious desire to make the absent figure present in her mind, and— but that was impossible, absolutely out of the question.

To cut a long story short, Julian just wanted to fuck her. That was it. He felt nothing, he didn’t love. He just wanted to fuck a nice little Danish astronaut if he felt like it. Just as he fucked the whole world when he felt like it.

Stupid idiot!

She violently pulled her hands away, pressed them to the edge of the wooden bench beside her hips and looked out at the wonder of the gorge with its pastel-coloured surfaces and uncompromising shadows. Thousands upon thousands of bright, frozen stars suddenly seemed more attainable than the life that she would have liked to live by his side. She wasn’t concerned with his money, or rather it wasn’t really about the money, even though she didn’t necessarily scorn it. No, she wanted a place in that vision-filled brain, capable of dreaming up space lifts, she wanted to be Julian’s personal stroke of genius, his most brilliant idea, and to be seen as such by the world, as the woman he desired. She hadn’t just fucked her way to that, she’d earned it!

Telling him things like that was the reason she was sitting here. Without wanting to put any pressure on him, of course. Just a bit of homeopathically prescribed planning for the future, allied to what she saw as the dazzlingly attractive option of an act of love in the sauna, as soon as the Ganymede landed. That was what they had agreed, and Julian had promised to join her straight away, but now it was a quarter to eight, and on demand she would have to listen to an unconvincing-sounding Lynn as she served up the fairy tale that the group, enchanted by the Schröter Valley, had forgotten time and would be an hour or two late.

How could Lynn have known that without a satellite connection?

Okay, she didn’t know. Even in the morning, Julian had talked about an extended excursion into the hinterland of Snake Hill and predicted a late return. No cause for concern. Everything was bound to be fine.

Fine. Ha ha.

Nina stared dully ahead. Perhaps it was fine to fuck the guests around, but not her, thank you very much. She should never have got involved with the richest old codger in the world. It was as simple as that. High time to take an ice-cold shower and do a few lengths in the pool.

‘No, there’s something solemn about it,’ Ögi said. ‘Only if you transcend it, of course.’

‘If you what?’ Winter smiled.

‘If you reduce the immediately perceptible to its significance, my dear,’ Ögi explained. ‘The most difficult exercise these days. Some people call it religion.’

‘A tilted flag? An old landing module?’

‘An old landing module and the essentially rather unexciting leftovers of two men in a boring-looking area of the Moon – but they were the first men who ever set foot on it! Do you understand? It gives the whole of the Mare Tranquillitatis a – a—’

Ögi struggled for words.

‘Sacred dignity?’ Aileen Donoghue suggested, with gleaming eyes and a church-going tone.

‘Exactly!’

‘Aha,’ said Winter.

‘Do you have to believe in God to feel that?’ Rebecca Hsu fished a glacé cherry out of her drink, pursed her lips and sucked it into her mouth. A quiet slurp and it was gone. ‘I just found it significant, but sacred—’

‘Because you have no sacred tradition,’ Chucky said to her. ‘Your people, I mean. Your nation. The Chinese don’t hold with the sacred.’

‘Thanks for reminding me. At least now I know why I liked the Rupes Recta better.’

They had assembled for communicative relaxation exercises in the Mama Quilla Club, and were trying to quell their anxiety about the continued absence of the Ganymede by vociferously going through the day’s events. In the western Mare Tranquillitatis they had admired the landing console of the very first lunar module, in which Armstrong and Aldrin had landed on the satellite in 1969. The area was considered a culturally protected area, along with three little craters, named after the pioneers and the third man, Collins, who had had to stay in the spaceship. Even during their approach, from a great height, the museum, as the region was generally known, had revealed the full banality of man’s arrival. Small and parasitic, like a fly on the hide of an elephant, the console stuck to the regolith, and Armstrong’s famous bootprint lay in splendour under a glass case. A place for pilgrims. Doubtless there were more magnificent cathedrals, and yet Ögi was right when he felt there was something in it that bestowed significance and greatness on the human race. It was the certainty that they wouldn’t have been able to stand there if those men hadn’t taken the journey through the airless wastes and performed the miracle of the first moon landing. So what they felt was respect, in the end. Later that afternoon, in the view of the infinite-looking wall of Rupes Recta, which looked as if the whole Moon continued on a level 200 metres higher up, they had succumbed to the sublimity of the cosmic architecture, deeply impressed, admittedly, but without feeling the curiously touching power emanated by the pitiful memorabilia of human presence in the Mare Tranquillitatis. At that moment most of them had understood that they were not pioneers. No one said hello to a pioneer. He was greeted not by shabby metal frames, not by bootprints, but only by loneliness, the unknown.

Lynn Orley and Dana Lawrence made a great effort to keep the cheerful chitchat going until Olympiada Rogacheva set down her glass and said, ‘I’d like to talk to my husband now.’

The others fell silent. Clammy consternation settled on the gathering. She had just broken an unspoken covenant that they should not worry, but somehow everyone seemed happy about it, particularly Chuck, who had already had to tell three miserable jokes just to drown out the sound of his menacingly grumbling belly.

‘Come on, Dana,’ he blustered. ‘What’s going on? What are you not telling us?’

‘A satellite breakdown is nothing serious, Mr Donoghue.’

‘Chuck.’

‘Chuck. For example a mini-meteorite the size of a grain of sand can temporarily paralyse a satellite, and the LPCS—’

‘But you don’t need the LPCS. Armstrong’s gang didn’t have an LPCS.’

‘I can assure you that the technical defect will soon be repaired. That will take a while, but soon we’ll be in contact with the Earth exactly as we were before.’

‘It’s odd, though, having no sign of them,’ said Aileen.

‘Not at all.’ Lynn gave a strained smile. ‘You know Julian. He’s organised a huge schedule. He said even this morning that they’d probably be late. And by the way, have you seen the system of grooves between the Mare Tranquillitatis and the Sinus Medii? You must have done, when you flew to Rupes Recta.’

‘Yes, they look like streets,’ said Hsu, and the whistling in the forest resumed.

Olympiada stared straight ahead. Winter noticed her catatonia, stopped licking at the sugar rim of her strawberry daiquiri, edged closer and put a tanned arm around her narrow, drooping shoulders.

‘Don’t worry, sweetie. You’ll have him back soon enough.’

‘I feel so shabby,’ Olympiada replied quietly.

‘Why shabby?’

‘So miserable. So useless. When you really want to talk to somebody you despise, just because there’s no one else there, it’s pitiful.’

‘But you’ve got us!’ Winter murmured, and kissed her on the temple, a seal of sisterhood. Only then did she seem to understand what Olympiada had just said. ‘So what do you mean, despise? Not Oleg, surely?’

‘Who else?’

‘Hmph! You despise Oleg?’

‘We despise each other.’

Winter considered those words. She tried out, one at a time, a collection of suitable-seeming facial expressions: amazement, reflection, sympathy, puzzlement; she studied the outward appearance of the Russian woman as if seeing her for the very first time. Olympiada’s evening wear, a catsuit, one of Mimi Parker’s, that changed colour according to the wearer’s state of mind, hung on her as if it had been thrown over the back of a chair, eyeliner and jewellery competed to remove the traces of years of neglect and marital suffering. She could have looked so much better. A bit of botox in her cheeks and forehead, hyaluron to smooth the wrinkles around her mouth, a little implant here and there to firm up her confidence and her connective tissues. At that moment she decided to have the implants in her own bottom changed as soon as they got back. There was something wrong with them, if you sat on them for too long.

‘Why don’t you just leave him?’ she asked.

‘Why doesn’t a doormat leave the front door that it lies outside?’ Olympiada mused.

Oh, God almighty! Winter was puzzled. Of course she found herself irresistible in all her firm glory, but did you really have to look like a gym-ripped Valkyrie to be spared the sorts of thoughts that Olympiada wallowed in?

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I think you’re making a mistake. A big fat error of reasoning.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. You think you’re shabby because you think no one wants you, so you allow yourself to be shabbily treated, just to be treated at all.’

‘Hmm.’

‘But the truth is that no one wants you because you feel shabby. You understand? The other way round. Casuality, causality or whatever it’s called, that thing with cause and effect, I’m not that educated, but I know that’s how it works. You think other people think you’re crap, so you feel crap and look crap, and in the end what everyone sees is crap, so it comes full circle. Am I making myself understood? A kind of inner – prejudgement. Because in fact you’re your own biggest, erm… enemy. And because at some level you enjoy it. You want to suffer.’

Wow, that sounded awesome! As if she’d been to college.

‘You think?’ Olympiada asked, and looked at Winter from the gloomy November puddles that were her eyes.

‘Of course!’ She liked this, it was getting really psychological. She ought to do this kind of thing more often. ‘And you know why you want to suffer? Because you’re looking for confirmation! Because you think you’re, as we’ve seen, you think you’re—’ Vocabulary, Miranda, vocabulary! Not just crap, what’s another word? ‘Shit. You think you’re shit, nothing else, but being shit is still better than being nothing at all, and if someone else thinks you’re shit too, you understand, then that’s a crystal-clear confirmation of what you think.’

‘Heavens above.’

‘Misery is reliable, believe me.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘No, it is, feeling shit gives you something to depend on. What do people say when they go to church? God, I am sinful, worthless, I’ve done terrible things, even before I was born, I’m a miserable piece of filth, forgive me, and if you can’t that’s okay too, you’re right, I’m just an ant, an original ant—’

‘Original ant?’

‘Yes, original something or other!’ She gesticulated wildly, as if intoxicated. ‘There’s something like that in Christian stuff, where you’re the lowest of the low from the get-go. That’s exactly how you feel. You think suffering is home. Wrong. Suffering is shit.’

‘You never suffer?’

‘Of course I do, like a dog! You know that. I was an alcoholic, I was described as the worst actress ever, I was in jail, up before the court. Wow!’ She laughed, in love with the disaster of her own biography. ‘That was out of order.’

‘But why does none of that matter to you?’

‘It does, it does! Bad luck really matters to me.’

‘But you don’t think that from the outset you’re, erm—’

‘No.’ Winter shook her head. ‘Just briefly, when I was drinking. Otherwise I wouldn’t know what I was talking about here. But not fundamentally.’

Olympiada smiled for the first time that evening, carefully, as if she wasn’t sure that her face was made for it.

‘Will you tell me a secret, Miranda?’

‘Anything, darling.’

‘How do you become like you?’

‘No idea.’ Winter reflected, thought seriously about the question. ‘I think you need a certain lack of… imagination.’

‘Lack of imagination?’

‘Yes.’ She laughed a whinnying laugh. ‘Just imagine, I have no imagination. Not a scrap. I can’t see myself the way others do. I mean, I can see that they think I’m cool, that they undress me with their eyes, fine. But otherwise I see myself only through my own eyes, and if I don’t like something I change it. I just can’t imagine how other people want me to be, so I don’t try to be that way.’ She paused and indicated to Funaki that her glass was empty. ‘And now you stop seeing yourself through Oleg’s eyes, okay? You’re nice, really nice! Oh, my God, you’re a member of the Russian – what is it again?’

‘Parliament.’

‘And rich and everything! And where your appearance is concerned, okay, fine, I’ll be honest with you, but give me four weeks and I’ll make a femme fatale out of you! You don’t need any of that, Olympiada. You certainly don’t need to miss Oleg.’

‘Hmm.’

‘You know what?’ She gripped Olympiada’s upper arm and lowered her voice. ‘Now I’ll tell you a real secret: men only make women feel they’re shit because they feel shit themselves. You get it? They try to break our confidence, they try to steal it from us because they have none themselves. Don’t do that! Don’t let them do that to you! You have to fly your own flag, honey. You’re not what he wants you to be.’ Complicated sentence structure, but it worked. She was getting better and better.

‘He might never come back,’ Olympiada murmured, apparently spotting a path opening up into sunnier climes.

‘Exactly. Fuck him.’

Olympiada sighed. ‘Okay.’

‘Michio, my darling,’ Winter crowed, and waved her empty glass. ‘One of these for my friend!’

Sophie Thiel was stumbling around in betrayal and deception when Tim came into the control centre. A dozen windows on the big multimedia wall reanimated the past.

‘Totally fake,’ said Sophie listlessly.

He watched people crossing the lobby, entering the control centre, going about their work, leaving it. Then the rooms lay there again, gloomy and desperate, lit only by the harsh reflection of the sunlight on the edge of the gorge and the controls of the tireless machinery that kept the hotel alive. Sophie pointed to one of the shots. The camera angle was arranged in such a way that you could make out the far side of the Vallis Alpina, with mountains and monorail through the panoramic window.

‘The control centre, deserted. That night when Hanna went out on the Lunar Express.’

Tim narrowed his eyes and leaned forward.

‘Don’t try just yet, you won’t get to see him. Your sister would say it’s because no one went anywhere. In fact, someone’s hoodwinking us with the oldest trick in the book. You see that thing blinking on the right-hand edge of the video wall?’

‘Yes.’

‘At almost exactly the same time something lights up down here, and there, a bit further on, an indicator light comes on. You see? Trivial things that no one would normally notice, but I’ve taken the trouble to look for matches. Take a look at the timecode.’

05.53, Tim read.

‘You’ll find exactly the same sequence at ten past five.’

‘Coincidence?’

‘Not if close analysis reveals a tiny jump in the shadow on the Moon’s surface. The sequence was copied and added to hide an event that lasted just two minutes.’

‘The arrival of the Lunar Express,’ whispered Tim.

‘Yes, and that’s exactly how it goes on. Hanna in the corridor, edited out, just like your father said. The control centre, apparently empty. But there was someone there. Someone who sat here and changed these videos; he’s just cut himself out. Perfectly done, the whole thing. The lobby, a different perspective that would show you Mr X coming into the control centre, but also faked, unfortunately.’

‘Someone must have spent an endless amount of time over it,’ Tim said, amazed.

‘No, it’s pretty fast if you know what needs to be done.’

‘Astounding!’

‘Frustrating above all, because it doesn’t get us anywhere. Now we know that it was done. But not who did it.’

Tim pursed his lips. Suddenly he had an idea.

‘Sophie, if we can trace back when the work on the videos was done – if we could take a look at the records – I mean, can you manipulate the records as well?’

She frowned. ‘Only if you take a lot of trouble.’

‘But it could be done?’

‘Basically it couldn’t. The intervention would be recorded as well. Hmm. I see.’

‘If we knew the exact times of the interventions, we could match them with the presence and absence of the guests and the staff. Who was where at the time in question? Who saw who? Our mystery person can’t possibly have changed all the data in the hotel system in the time available to him. So as soon as we see the records—’

‘We’ll have him.’ Sophie nodded. ‘But to do that we’d need an authorisation program.’

‘I’ve got one.’

‘What?’ She looked at him in surprise. ‘An authorisation program for this system?’

‘No, a common or garden little mole that I downloaded from the net last winter to look at a colleague’s data. With his permission,’ he added quickly. ‘His system did a screen shot every sixty seconds, and I had to get at those shots, but I didn’t have authorisation. So I resorted to the knowledge of some of my students. One of them recommended Gravedigger, an, erm, a not entirely legal reconstruction program, but one that’s quite easy to get hold of and compatible with almost every system. I kept it. It’s on my computer, and my computer—’

‘—is here in Gaia.’

‘Bingo.’ Tim grinned. ‘In my room.’

Sophie smiled broadly. ‘Right, Mr Orley, so if you don’t mind—’

‘I’m on my way.’

It was only when he was on the way to the suite that it occurred to him that there might be another reason why Sophie found nothing but manipulated videos:

She herself had recut the material.

Mukesh Nair pulled himself snorting out of the crater pool. A little further off Sushma was towelling herself dry, in conversation with Eva Borelius and Karla Kramp, while Heidrun Ögi and Finn O’Keefe played childish competitions, to see who could stay underwater longest. The Earth shone in through the panoramic window, like a reliable old friend. Nair picked a towel off the pile and rubbed the water out of his hair.

‘Do you feel like this?’ he said. ‘When I see our home, it’s curious: it looks entirely unimpressed.’

‘Unimpressed by what?’ asked Karla, and disappeared into her dressing gown.

‘By us.’ Mukesh Nair lowered the towel and looked up to the sky. ‘By the consequences of our actions. It’s got hotter everywhere. Previously inhabited areas are underwater, others are turning into deserts. Whole tribes of people are on the move, hungry, thirsty, unemployed, homeless, we’re seeing the biggest migrations in centuries, but there’s no sign of it at all. Not from this distance.’

‘Looking at the old lady from this distance, you wouldn’t know if we were bombing each other flat,’ said Karla. ‘Means nothing.’

Nair shook his head, fascinated.

‘The deserts must have got bigger, don’t you think? Whole coastlines have changed. But if you’re far enough away – it doesn’t change her beauty in the slightest.’

‘If you’re far enough away,’ Sushma smiled, ‘even I’m beautiful.’

‘Oh, Sushma!’ Her husband tilted his head and laughed, showing perfectly restored teeth. ‘You will always be the most beautiful woman in the world to me, near or far. You’re my most beautiful vegetable of all!’

‘There’s a compliment,’ said Heidrun to Finn, water in one ear, Nair’s flattering baritone in the other. ‘Why do I never get to hear things like that?’

‘Because I’m not Walo.’

‘Lousy explanation.’

‘Comparing people to foodstuffs is his department.’

‘Is it just me, or have you stopped making much of an effort lately?’

‘Vegetables don’t spring to mind when I look at you. Asparagus, perhaps.’

‘Finn, I really have to say, that’s going to get you nowhere.’ She hurried to the edge of the pool, straightened and sent a great spray of water in Nair’s direction. ‘Hey! What are you talking about?’

‘The beauty of the Earth,’ smiled Sushma Nair. ‘And a bit about the beauty of women.’

‘Same thing,’ said Heidrun. ‘The Earth is female.’

Eva tied the belt of her kimono. ‘You see beauty out there?’

‘Of course.’ Nair nodded enthusiastically. ‘Beauty and simplicity.’

‘Shall I tell you what I see?’ Eva Borelius said after thinking for a moment. ‘A misunderstanding.’

‘How so?’

‘Complete disproportion. The Earth out there has nothing to do with our familiar perception of it.’

‘That’s true,’ said Heidrun. ‘For example, Switzerland normally seems the size of Africa to a Swiss person. On the other hand, in the emotional reality of a Swiss person, Africa shrinks to a hot, damp island full of poor people, mosquitoes, snakes and diseases.’

‘That’s exactly what I’m talking about.’ Eva nodded. ‘I see a beautiful planet, but not one that we share. A world which, in terms of what some have and others don’t, should look completely different.’

‘Bravo.’ Finn O’Keefe bobbed over and applauded.

‘Enough, Finn,’ hissed Heidrun. ‘Do you even know what we’re talking about?’

‘Of course,’ he yawned. ‘About how Eva Borelius had to fly to the Moon to discover the bleedin’ obvious.’

‘No.’ Eva laughed drily and started picking up her swimming things. ‘I’ve always known what the planet looks like, Finn, but it’s still different seeing it like this. It reminds me who we’re actually researching for.’

‘You’re researching for the guy who’s paying you. Have you only just realised?’

‘That free research is going down the toilet? No.’

‘Not that you personally have any reason to complain,’ Karla joined in maliciously.

‘Hey, hang on.’ Eva, caught in a pincer movement, raised her eyebrows. ‘Am I complaining?’

Karla looked innocently back. ‘I just wanted to say.’

‘Of course, stem cell research brings in money, so she gets some too. It cost a lot of money to take the isolation and investigation of adult cells and develop it into the production of artificial tissue. Now we’ve decoded the protein blueprints of our body cells, we work successfully with molecular prosthetics, we have replacements for destroyed nerves and burnt skin, we can produce new cardiac muscle cells, we can cure cancer, because not even the wealthiest people in the world are spared heart attacks, cancer and burn injuries.’ She paused. ‘But they are spared malaria. And cholera. Those are diseases for poor people. If we were to apportion budgets purely on the quantitative occurrence of such diseases, the greatest amount of research money would flow to the Third World. Instead, the majority of all malaria patents, even the most promising, are put on ice, because you can’t earn any money with them.’

Nair went on looking at the far-away Earth, still smiling, but more thoughtfully.

‘I come from an unimaginably big country,’ he said. ‘And at the same time from a graspable cosmos. I’ve never had the impression that there’s just one world, not least because we see it from all perspectives at the same time. No one sees it as a whole, no one sees the whole truth. But if we see the world as a multiplicity of small, interlocking worlds, each determined by its own rules, you can try to improve some of them. And that helps you to understand the whole. If my job had been to improve the world, I would definitely have failed.’

‘So what have you improved?’ asked Karla.

‘A few of those little worlds.’ He beamed at them. ‘At least I hope so.’

‘You’ve carpeted India with air-conditioned shopping centres, connected whole villages to the internet, provided God knows how many thousands of Indian farmers with a basic living. But haven’t you also opened the door to multinational companies, by offering them the chance to get involved?’

‘Of course.’

‘And haven’t some of them gratefully taken up your model, rented Indian land and replaced the farmers with machines and cheap labourers?’

Nair’s smile froze on his face. ‘Any idea can be corrupted.’

‘I’d just like to understand.’

‘Certainly, such things happen. We can’t allow that.’

‘Look, I don’t entirely agree with your romanticisation of inequality. Small, autonomous worlds. You do a lot of good things, Mukesh, but you’re globalisation personified. Which I think is fine, as long as the tiny little worlds aren’t swallowed up by the big companies—’

‘Shouldn’t we be getting back to our rooms?’ said Eva.

‘Yes, of course.’ Karla shrugged. ‘Let’s go. Typical of you, always going on about how annoyed you are, and then getting all ashamed when I mention some concrete examples.’

‘Where have the others got to, by the way?’ Sushma shook her head uneasily. ‘They should have been back ages ago.’

‘When we came down here they were still on their way.’

‘And they still are, by the look of it,’ said Nair. Then he rested a friendly hand on Karla’s shoulder. ‘And you’re completely right, Karla. We should talk about this kind of thing more often. And not spare each other’s feelings.’

‘Shall I tell you how I see it?’ asked Finn.

They all looked at him.

‘I see two dozen of the richest people on this much-discussed planet Earth feeling trapped between malaria and champagne and, in line with the disproportion that you mentioned, Eva, escaping to the Moon, where they reach remarkable insights in the most expensive hotel in the solar system. You know what? I’m going for another couple of lengths.’

Sophie had installed Tim’s program and asked him casually whether it hadn’t occurred to him that she might be the traitor. He had looked baffled for a moment, before exploding with laughter.

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘You bet.’

‘Well—’

‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘Happy now?’

He laughed again. ‘If people got out of jail by saying that, we could convert our prisons into hen houses.’

‘You’re a teacher, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many times do you hear that every day?’

‘What? “It’s not me, it wasn’t me”?’ He shrugged. ‘No idea. I usually lose track at about midday. But okay, it wasn’t you. Do you suspect anybody?’

She lowered her head over the keyboard, so that her blonde curls hid her facial expression.

‘Not directly.’

‘You’re thinking about my sister, aren’t you?’ He sighed. ‘Come on, Sophie, it’s not a problem, I’m not cross with you. You’re not the only person who feels that way. Dana has completely homed in on Lynn.’

‘I know.’ Sophie looked up. ‘But I don’t believe for a second that your sister has anything to do with it. Lynn built this hotel. It would be completely idiotic. And what’s more, it’s only just now occurred to me, but when she refused to let your father see the corridor video – why would she have done that? I mean, why, if she had actually recut it herself? In her place I’d have proudly rubbed his nose in it.’

Tim looked grateful and curiously glum at the same time. It was immediately clear to her that he was more inclined towards Dana’s opinion than her own, and that he was bothered by the fact.

‘Quite honestly,’ she smiled shyly, ‘I was wondering before whether you yourself mightn’t—’

‘Ah!’ he grinned. ‘No, it wasn’t me.’

‘More hen houses.’ She smiled back. ‘Would you like to keep me company while I reconstruct the records?’

‘No, I’d just like to see where Lynn’s got to. But call me if you think of anything.’ He smiled. ‘You’re very brave, Sophie. Will you manage?’

‘Somehow.’

‘Not a bit scared?’

She shrugged. ‘Oddly, the thing I’m least worried about is the idea of being blown up. It’s too unreal. If it does happen, we’ll all go in a flash, but we’re not going to know all that much about it.’

‘I feel the same.’

‘So what are you afraid of?’

‘Right now? I’m worried about Amber. Very worried. About my wife, about my father—’

‘About your sister—’

‘Yes. About Lynn too. See you later, Sophie.’

‘That wasn’t nice,’ Heidrun mocked, after the others had fled the pool area. Only she and Finn were still drifting in the black water of the crater, somewhere between idyll and apocalypse.

‘But true,’ said Finn, launching into a crawl away from her.

She pushed her wet hair behind her ears. Below the surface of the water her body was compressed into a bony caricature of itself, as if the waves were starting to dissolve her. Finn cut a swathe through the water like a motorboat, sending watery chaos in all directions, great surges that a swimmer could never have produced in terrestrial waters. An amusement factor reserved only for moon travellers. You could catapult yourself out of the water like a dolphin and, when you splashed back in again, set small tsunamis on their way. You were operating in arrogant opposition to the laws of gravity, but Finn’s mood was closer to the grey of the surrounding landscape. Heidrun stretched, dived, slipped after him and past him and burst through the surface. Finn saw that the way to the opposite edge of the crater was blocked, and balanced himself in the water.

‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘Bad mood?’

‘No idea.’ He shrugged. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be going up?’

‘And what about you?’

‘I haven’t made any dates with anybody.’

Heidrun thought for a moment. Had she made any dates? With Walo, of course, but could you really describe the day-to-day magnetism of marriage as a date?

‘So you’ve no idea what your mood is.’

‘I don’t know.’

It was true, she guessed, Finn probably just had no idea why his mood had so suddenly soured. He had been in great form all day, making her laugh with his laconic sarcasm, a gift that Heidrun valued above all others. She liked men whose wit sprang from easy understatement, which gave them the ultimate accolade of cool. In her opinion there was hardly anything more erotic than laughter, sadly an attitude fraught with difficulties, because the majority of the male sex tended to try to produce it intellectually. The result was usually tiresome and discouraging. In their constant bid to score points with hilarious thigh-slappers, these suitors lost what remained of their natural machismo, and there was much worse to come. For her part, Heidrun derived intense and noisy pleasure from sex, and had ended up in paroxysms of laughter during so many orgasms that the gentlemen in question, convinced that they were the object of her laughter, were thrown spontaneously off their stroke. The drop in pleasure pressure was always followed by the same embarrassment, she always felt guilty, but what was she supposed to do? She loved laughing. Ögi was the first to understand. Heidrun’s natural responses neither inhibited his erections nor slowed him down in any way. Walo Ögi with his chiselled Zürich physiognomy, which could break out into ringing laughter at any time, took sex no more seriously than she did, with the result that they both enjoyed it a great deal.

Finn, on the other hand. Viewed objectively, in so far as the objectification of beauty was ever justified, he was far better looking than Walo, in terms of classical proportion at any rate: he was perfectly built and a good sixteen years younger. Apart from that, he had the appearance of an uncommunicative and sometimes sulky melancholic. He concealed his stroppiness behind insecurity, his shyness behind indifference, but he was enough of an actor to flirt professionally with all of these qualities. As a result he was surrounded by the aura of mystery that turned millions of emancipated female individuals into spineless mush. Supposedly shy, he cultivated the pose of the eternal outsider in a world whose cofounder and original inhabitant he was; he acted the part of the lout, as if Marlon Brando, James Dean and Johnny Depp hadn’t already taken the idea to ludicrous extremes, and exuded a sweaty rebellious appeal. He couldn’t, with the best will in the world, ever have been described as the life and soul. And yet behind the forbidding façade Heidrun sensed an inclination to excess, to anarchic fun, to wild parties, as long as the right people were invited. She had no doubt that one could fool about with him, and have laughing sex until libido and diaphragm both gave in, after hours.

‘They’re getting on your nerves, aren’t they?’ she surmised. ‘Our lovely fellow travellers.’

Finn rubbed water out of his eyes.

‘I get on my own nerves,’ he said. ‘Because I think it’s my problem.’

‘What is?’

‘Not rising like a spiritual soufflé up here. It seems almost unavoidable. Everyone is constantly coming out with the loveliest philosophical observations. There isn’t anyone who hasn’t a clever thing to say. Some of them burst into tears at the very sight of the Earth, others wallow in self-mortification at the thought of their earthly striving. Eva sees injustice and Mukesh Nair sees miracles and wonder in every grain of moon dust. A complete social elite seem determined to relativise their previous lives, just because they’re sitting on a lump of stone so far from the Earth that you can see the whole thing. And what occurs to me? Just a stupid old saying from the Pre-Cambrian era of space travel.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘Astronauts are men who don’t have to bring their wives anything back from their travels.’

‘Pretty dumb.’

‘You see? Everyone seems to find himself up here. And I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking for.’

‘So? Let them.’

‘I did say it isn’t their problem. It’s mine.’

‘You’re complaining on quite a high level, my dearest Finn.’

‘No, I’m not.’ He glared at her angrily. ‘It hasn’t the slightest thing to do with self-pity. I just feel empty, crippled. I’d love to feel that same powerful emotion, vaporise with reverence and get back to Earth inside out, to preach the word of enlightenment, but I don’t feel any of it. I can’t think of anything to say about this trip except that it’s nice, it’s a bit different. But it is, and remains, the bloody Moon, damn it all! No higher level of existence, no understanding or comprehension of anything at all. It doesn’t spiritualise me, it stirs nothing in me, and that’s got to be my problem! There must be more! I feel as if I’ve withered away.’

Doggy-paddling, they drifted towards one another. And while Heidrun was still wondering what she could reply to this outburst without sounding like a maiden aunt, she was suddenly close to him. His lines and wrinkles revealed a life of clueless carousal. She recognised Finn’s inability to make his brilliant talent chime with the banal realisation that in spite of his special gift he was not a special person, simply alive and, like everyone else, damned, on the highway that they were all hurtling along, one day to crash into the wall without ever having come close to the meaning of everything. Not a trace of apotheosis. Just someone who had had too much of everything without ever feeling sated by it, and who now, in his total cluelessness, reacted more honestly to the impressions of the journey than the rest of the group put together.

A moment later she sensed him.

She felt his hands on her hips, her backside. She felt them exploring her waist and back, his lips strangely cool on hers, wrapped both legs around him and pulled him so tightly to her that his sex pressed against hers, ambushed by the brazenness of his approach and even more by her own simmering readiness for a fling. She knew she was about to do something incredibly stupid that she would bitterly regret afterwards, but the whole catechism of marital fidelity was consumed in the heat of that moment, and if men thought with their dicks, as was so often rightly said, then her will and intelligence had just irrevocably faded away in her cunt, and that too was something so terrifyingly banal that all she could do was erupt with laughter.

Finn joined in.

It was the worst thing he could have done. Even an irritated twitch of his eyebrows would have saved her, a hint of incomprehension, but he just laughed and started rubbing her between the legs until she was terrified, even as her fingers clawed at the hem of his trunks and pulled them down, to liberate the engorged beast within.

Water monkeys, she thought. We’re water monkeys!

Uh! Uh!

‘I’d leave it if I were you,’ she heard Nina Hedegaard saying, just before the water started splashing. ‘He’ll bring you nothing but frustration and a whole host of problems.’

As if struck by lightning they parted. Finn reached irritably for his trunks. Heidrun dipped her head beneath the surface, breathed in crater water, came back up and coughed her lungs up. Scooping water like a paddle-steamer, Nina passed them on her back.

‘Sorry, I didn’t want to spoil your fun. But you should really think about it.’

And that was that.

Heidrun lacked the genetic prerequisites for blushing, but at that moment she could have sworn she turned beetroot, a beacon of embarrassment. She stared at Finn. To her infinite relief nothing in his expression suggested that the past few minutes had been embarrassing to him, only regret and a vague understanding that it was over. He plainly still wanted her, and she wanted him a bit less, but at the same time she felt an urgent longing for Walo, and the desire to kiss Nina for her intervention.

‘Yeah, we’ – Finn grinned crookedly – ‘were just about to go upstairs.’

‘So I saw,’ Nina said sullenly. She swam powerfully over to them and stood up in the water. ‘I’ll keep my mouth shut, don’t worry. The rest is your business. They’re starting to get worried up there. Julian’s group still isn’t back, and neither are the satellites.’

‘Didn’t Julian say anything?’ Heidrun asked, her whole body still one big heartbeat. ‘This morning, I mean.’

‘No, he said they’d be showing up later. Too busy a schedule, says Lynn.’

‘Then that’s how it is.’

‘Seems odd to me.’

‘Julian would definitely have tried to get through, to you first of all,’ said O’Keefe.

‘Yeah, great, and what would you do, Finn, if you didn’t get through? You’d be on time! So as not to worry the others. And I’m not stupid, there’s more to it than that. There’s something they aren’t telling me.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘Dana Lawrence, the cold fish. Lynn. Who knows? Dinner’s now been arranged for nine, by the way.’

Heidrun could tell by the tip of Finn’s nose that he was thinking exactly the same as she was, whether they shouldn’t make use of that time in his suite. But it was a pale, threadbare thought, less than a thought, in fact, since it came not from the head, not from the heart, but from the abdomen, whose coup had just been permanently thwarted. Finn slipped over and gave her a quick kiss. There was something conciliatory, something final about it.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go up and join the others.’

London, Great Britain

After the conversation with Palstein, Jericho had taken a trip around the highly armed information centre and introduced Jennifer to the contents of his rucksack.

‘Diane,’ he said. ‘The fourth member of the alliance.’

‘Diane?’ An eyebrow rose in her grumpy face.

‘Mm-hm. Diane.’

‘I see. Your daughter or your wife?’

Since then Diane had been alternately connected to the public internet and the internal, hacker-protected intranet of the Big O, a system locked against the outside world, with no way in, but no way out either. Jennifer had summarily authorised him to access parts of the company’s own database, equipped with a password that allowed him to trace the global network of the company, its history and its staff structure. At the same time, thanks to Diane, he was working on familiar ground. Without the company of Tu or Yoyo, who had wanted to visit the fat guy for a few minutes and had been overdue since then, he felt miserably alone, just a messenger, good enough to lay his head on the line for others, but not to be taken into anybody’s friendly confidence.

Pah, friends! Let the two of them wallow in misery. At last he was warmed again by Diane’s soft, dark computer voice, untroubled by any kind of sensitivity.

He asked her to go through the net for arrangements of terms, Palstein, attempted murder, assassination, assassin, Orley, China, investigations, discoveries, results, etc. On the oil manager’s initiative, the Canadian authorities had sent a large supply of pictures and film material which he, Edda Hoff, a member of the IT security department and a woman from MI6 were now assessing together. If only Palstein had been willing to hand over the video that supposedly showed his attacker, they could presumably have spared themselves all that wretched work. Diane brought him things she’d found about the Calgary shooting the way a cat brings in half-dead mice, but where the rest of the decoding of the text fragment was concerned she was poking around in the dark. Clearly the hurricane murmur of the dark network had fallen silent. In contrast, pictures, reports, assessments and conspiracy theories about Calgary were flooding in, but without shedding light on anything.

He went to see Jennifer Shaw.

‘Good to see you.’ Jennifer was in a video conference with representatives of MI6, and waved him in. ‘If you’ve got anything new—’

‘When was Gaia originally supposed to open?’ Jericho asked, pulling up a chair.

‘You know that. Last year.’

‘When exactly?’

‘Okay, it had been planned for late summer, but projects like that are never as ready as you hope they’re going to be. It could have been autumn or winter.’

‘And because of the Moon crisis—’

‘No, not just because of that.’ Norrington came into the room. ‘You’re in the temple of truth here, Owen. We’re happy to admit that there were technical delays. The unofficial opening was scheduled for August 2024, but even without a crisis we’d hardly have managed it before 2025.’

‘So the completion date wasn’t foreseeable at the time?’

‘Why do you ask?’ one of the MI6 people wanted to know.

‘Because I’m wondering whether the mini-nuke was put up there only in order to destroy Gaia. Something people knew would be finished, but didn’t know when. But when the satellite was started, it wasn’t finished.’

‘You’re right,’ the MI6 man said thoughtfully. ‘They could have waited for the launch, in fact they should have done.’

‘Why should they?’ asked another one.

‘Because every atom bomb gives off radiation. You can’t store a thing like that on the Moon indefinitely, where there’s no convection to carry away the heat. There’s a danger of the bomb overheating and going off prematurely.’

‘So it was definitely supposed to detonate in 2024,’ Jennifer surmised.

‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ said Jericho. ‘Was it or is it meant only for Gaia? How much explosive do you need to blow up a hotel?’

‘Lots,’ said Norrington.

‘But not an atom bomb?’

‘Not unless you want to contaminate the whole site, the wider surroundings,’ said the MI6 man.

Jericho nodded. ‘So what’s up with it?’

‘With the Vallis Alpina?’ Jennifer thought for a minute. ‘Nothing, as far as I know. But that needn’t mean anything.’

‘What are you getting at?’ asked Norrington.

‘Very simple,’ Jericho said. ‘If we agree that the bomb was to be detonated in 2024, regardless of whether Gaia had been completed or not, the question arises as to why it didn’t happen.’

‘Because something got in the way,’ Jennifer reflected.

Jericho smiled. ‘Because something got in someone’s way. Because someone was prevented from setting the thing off, one way or another. That means we should stop wondering about the where and the when, and concentrate on that person who possibly, in fact probably isn’t called Carl Hanna. So who was on the Moon or on the way to the Moon last year who could have detonated the bomb? What happened to make sure that it didn’t go off?’

And meanwhile he was thinking: who am I telling all this to? Jennifer had mentioned the possibility of a mole, a traitor who drew his information from the inner security circle. Who was the mole? Edda Hoff, opaque and brittle? One of the divisional directors? Tom Merrick, that bundle of nerves responsible for communication security – could he have been responsible for the block that he was pretending to investigate? And apart from Andrew Norrington, was there someone listening to his hypotheses who shouldn’t have known about them? Always allowing that Jennifer hadn’t mentioned moles to distract attention from herself.

How safe were they really in the Big O?

Gaia, Vallis Alpina, The Moon

The chronological recording was swiftly reconstructed. True to its name, the Grave-digger burrowed its way into the depths of the system and drew up a complete list, but because this encompassed activities carried out over several days, it looked like something that would keep you occupied for three rainy weekends.

‘Shit,’ whispered Sophie.

But if you cut down the periods of time in question, the work went faster than you might have expected. And the faker’s trail ran like a pattern through the recordings, because after every action he erased his traces. The video of Hanna’s night-time trip, for example, had been recut while the Canadian had been exploring Gaia’s surroundings with Julian, or more precisely between a quarter past six and half past on the morning in question. Unambiguous proof that Hanna himself hadn’t set about erasing his traces.

Where had she been at that point? In bed. Hadn’t got up till seven. Until then the lobby and the control centre had been populated only by machines. In a simultaneous projection, she screened all the recordings of the period during which the phantom had done his work, but no one left his room, no one crouched in a hidden corner operating the system from somewhere else.

Impossible!

Someone must surely have been wandering about the hotel at that time.

Had these videos been manipulated too?

She studied the recordings more precisely, and had the computer examine all the films for subsequently introduced cuts.

Sure enough.

Sophie stared at the monitor wall. This thing was getting increasingly weird. Everything she saw here, or rather didn’t see, was evidence of unsettling professionalism and strength of nerve. If it went on like this, in the end she would have to go through every single order in the vague hope that the faker might give himself away by some tiny blunder. Just as it had soared a moment before, her mood now plummeted. It was pointless. The stranger had used his time and opportunities to the full, he was ahead of her.

Maybe she should approach the business the other way round, she thought. Start with the last significant event, the satellite failure. Perhaps the phantom hadn’t had time to clean up after himself when that happened.

She isolated the passage from the conference call until it suddenly broke off, and had the computer play through the whole sequence again. Her own actions were visible in the reconstruction: her taking the call, informing Dana and Lynn in the Selene and putting it through to Julian Orley. After that—

A shadow settled over her. She gave a start, threw her head back and sat bolt upright.

‘Erm – thought you might be hungry.’

‘Axel!’

Kokoschka’s monolithic appearance darkened her desktop. He held a plate in his right hand. The bony claw of a rack of lamb protruded from it, a nutty smell of courgettes wafted towards her.

‘God, Axel!’ she panted. ‘You frightened the life out of me!’

‘I’m sorry, I—’

‘Don’t worry. Phew! Shouldn’t you be tearing up walls and floors?’

‘Cerberus took us off the job,’ he grinned. ‘Hungry? East Friesian saltmarsh lamb.’

He looked at her, to the side, at the floor, then dared to make eye contact again. Christ, no. She’d guessed it. German boy loves German girl. Kokoschka had fallen for her.

‘That’s really sweet of you,’ she said, glancing at the plate.

His grin widened and he set the dish down on a free corner of the desktop, next to her, along with a napkin and cutlery. Suddenly she realised that over the course of the past hour hunger had crept up on her and was devouring her from within. She greedily inhaled the aromas. Kokoschka had separated out the cutlets for her. She took one of the fragile ribs between her fingers and gnawed the butter-soft flesh from the bone, as she turned once again to the screens.

‘Whatcha doin’?’ asked Kokoschka.

‘Checking the recordings from the afternoon,’ she said with her mouth full. ‘To see if I can find something out about the satellite failure.’

‘Do you think we’ve really got a bomb?’

‘Not the faintest, Axel.’

‘Hmm. Weird. Doesn’t really bother me, to be honest.’ His forehead was covered with sweat. In visible contradiction to his words, he seemed nervous and twitchy, stepped from one leg to the other, sniffed. ‘So you’re trying to find out where the bomb is?’

‘No, I want to know who Hanna’s accomplice—’

She stared at him.

Kokoschka held her eye for a few seconds, then his eyes drifted down to the video wall. He was perspiring more heavily now. His bald head was drenched, a vein throbbed in his temple. Sophie stopped chewing, and paused with her chin thrust out and her cheek bulging.

‘Okay, you’ve probably known for ages,’ Kokoschka said wearily into the room.

She gulped, and recoiled. ‘What?’

He looked at her.

‘Could we have a quick chat?’ Dana nodded to Lynn to follow her to the stairs that led from the Mama Quilla Club to the Luna Bar below it, and from there to the Selene and Chang’e. At that moment everyone’s attention was focused on Chuck, who stood there with a sly grin on his face, holding both hands, palms up and all ten fingers pointing upwards, stretched out in front of him.

‘What does the Pope mean when he does this?’

‘No idea,’ said Olympiada gloomily. Winter, unfamiliar with the habits of the Pontifex and clerical matters in general, shook her head in hopeful expectation that she might possibly get the punchline, while a chill gust of outrage blew all the benevolence from Aileen’s features. Rebecca Hsu sat next to her like a circus lion on a bar stool, and spoke into her hand computer in a hushed voice. Walo Ögi had absconded to his suite to read.

‘Chuck, please don’t.’

‘Oh, come on, Aileen.’

‘Don’t tell this one!’

‘What does the Pope mean?’ Winter giggled.

‘Chuck, no!’

‘Very simple.’ Donoghue snapped nine fingers closed, so that only the middle finger of his right hand was still pointing upwards. ‘The same as this, but in ten languages.’

Winter went on giggling, Hsu laughed, Olympiada pulled a face. Aileen looked around at everyone, hoping for forgiveness, with a tortured, powerless smile on her face. Lynn processed none of this as she would usually have done. Whatever she saw and heard looked like a sequence of rattling, stroboscopic flashes. Aileen accused Chuck of violating a joke-free zone called the Church, about which everyone had agreed, mercilessly wielding her falsetto scalpel, while Winter tee-heed inanely, a source of relentless torment.

‘We must assume that something has happened on the Aristarchus Plateau,’ Dana Lawrence said abruptly. ‘Something unpleasant.’

Lynn’s fingers bent and stretched.

‘Okay, we’ll send Nina out in the shuttle.’

‘We should do that,’ Dana nodded. ‘And evacuate Gaia.’

‘Hang on! We said we were going to wait.’

‘What for?’

‘For Julian.’

Dana glanced quickly at the seated group. Miranda Winter was chortling, ‘That’s great. Why in ten languages?’ while Chuck eyed them suspiciously.

‘Don’t you listen?’ she hissed. ‘I mentioned that Julian’s team might be in difficulties. We have no idea whether they’re going to turn up here, and we have a bomb threat. There are guests in the hotel now. We have to evacuate.’

‘But we’ve laid nine places for dinner.’

‘That doesn’t matter now.’

‘It does.’

‘It doesn’t, Lynn. I’ve had enough. I’ll call everyone together. Meet at half past eight in the Mama Quilla Club, give it to them straight. Then we’ll send out a radio flare for Julian, Nina will go in search of them, the rest of us will take the Lunar Express to—’

‘Nonsense. You’re talking nonsense!’

‘I’m talking nonsense?’

Chuck got to his feet and smoothed his trouser legs.

‘I really thought you knew,’ Kokoschka said, embarrassed.

Sophie shook her head in mute horror.

‘Hmm.’ He wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘Doesn’t really matter anyway. Bad moment, I guess.’

‘What for?’

‘I’ve fallen – I’ve sort of fallen – oh, forget it. I just wanted to say that I really… erm—’

Sophie melted with relief. Her hand strayed to the plate, but her belly hadn’t yet accepted the fact that Kokoschka had only wanted to declare his love, and it categorically refused to take in any more food.

‘I like you too,’ she said, trying to make sure that the like really meant like and nothing more.

Kokoschka rubbed his fingers over his spanking clean chef’s jacket.

‘I can’t wait to see if you find something,’ he said, looking at the display.

‘Me too, you can be sure of that.’ Switch of topic, thank heavens. She looked at the picture details, the list of recordings, the data flow. ‘The whole thing is very mysterious. We—’

She took a closer look.

‘What’s that?’ she whispered.

Kokoschka pushed in closer. ‘What?’

Sophie paused the reconstruction program. There was something. Something weird that she couldn’t quite place. A kind of menu, but a sort she’d never seen before. Simple, compact, connected to a rat’s tail of data, bundles of commands that had been sent only seconds before the breakdown of communication from Gaia. She understood a bit of computer language. She could read a lot of it, but this cryptic sequence of commands would have been meaningless in her eyes, if some of the codes hadn’t seemed familiar.

Codes for satellites.

The command to freeze communications had come from Gaia. She could see when and from where it had happened.

She knew who had done it.

‘Oh, my Christ,’ she whispered.

Fear, terrible, long-suppressed fear flooded all her cells, all her thoughts. Her fingers started trembling. Kokoschka leaned down to her.

‘What’s up?’ he asked

All sign of shyness had fled. The German’s eyes peered from his angular head. She spun round in her chair, opened a drawer, reached for a piece of paper, a pen, as she now no longer trusted the computer system. She hastily scribbled a few words on the paper, folded it together and pressed the little paper packet into his hand.

‘Take this to Tim Orley,’ she whispered. ‘Straight away.’

‘What is it?’

She hesitated. Should she tell him what she had found? Why not? But Kokoschka, with his childish temperament, was unpredictable, strong as a bear, capable of running off and thumping the person in question, which might prove to be a mistake.

‘Just take it to Tim,’ she said quietly. ‘Wherever he is. Tell him to come here straight away. Please, Axel, be quick. Don’t waste any time.’

Kokoschka turned the packet over in his fingers and stared at it for a second. Then he nodded, turned round and disappeared without another word.

‘We can’t evacuate,’ Lynn insisted feverishly. Her fingers became claws, her perfectly filed nails pressed into the flesh of her palms. ‘We can’t gamble with the trust of our guests.’

‘With the greatest respect, have you gone mad?’ whispered Dana. ‘This place could go up at any minute, and you’re talking about abusing the trust of your guests?’

Lynn stared at her and shook her head. Chuck strode resolutely forward.

‘Enough of this nonsense,’ he said. ‘I demand to know right now what’s actually going on here.’

‘Nothing,’ said Dana. ‘We’re just considering sending Nina Hedegaard to the Artistarchus Plateau on the Callisto, in case there really is something—’

‘Listen, girly, I may be old, but I’m not stupid.’ Chuck leaned down to Dana and brought his great leonine head level with her eyes. ‘So don’t underestimate me, okay? I run the best hotels in the world, I’ve built more of the things than you will ever set foot in, so stop trying to bullshit me.’

‘No one’s bullshitting you, Chuck, we’ve just—’

‘Lynn.’ Donoghue spread his arms in a conciliatory gesture. ‘Please tell her to drop it! I know this conniving expression, this whispering. Obviously there’s a crisis, but can you please tell me what’s happening here?’

Chuck had stopped being Chuck. He’d turned into a battering ram, he was trying to get inside her, to overwhelm her, but she wouldn’t let him in, wouldn’t let anyone in, she had to resist! Julian. Where was Julian? Far away! Just as he always had been, throughout her life. When she was born. When she needed him. When Crystal died. When, when, when. Julian? Far away! All the responsibility rested on her shoulders.

‘Lynn?’

Don’t lose control. Not now. Hold off the breakdown that was clearly coming with the inevitability of a supernova, long enough to act. Hold off Dana, her enemy. And everyone else who knew. Each one of them was her enemy. She was completely alone. She could only rely on herself.

‘Please excuse me.’

She had to act. Bumble, hum, buzz, bzzzz. A swarm of hornets, she ran down the stairs to the lift.

Chuck watched her open-mouthed.

‘What’s up with her?’

‘No idea,’ said Dana.

‘I didn’t mean to insult her,’ he stammered. ‘I really didn’t. I just wanted to—’

‘Do me a favour, okay? Go and join the others.’

Chuck rubbed his chin.

‘Please, Chuck,’ she said. ‘It’s all okay. I’ll keep you posted, I promise.’

She left him standing there and went after Lynn.

It wasn’t that Axel Kokoschka thought he was overweight, or not really. On the other hand his art represented the compatibility of genuine gourmet cuisine with the requirements of a fitness society fixated on the burning of calories. And in those terms he was overweight. Firmly resolved to reduce the fifteen kilos that he weighed up here at least to fourteen, he hardly ever used the lifts. Here again he leapt from bridge to bridge, forcing his burly body up one floor after another, and then took the flight of stairs to the neck. The area between Gaia’s shoulders and head was little more than a mezzanine where the passenger lifts stopped, and only the freight elevators and the staff lift continued to the kitchen. Where the side neck muscles would have been in a human being, stairs led to the suite wing below, swinging into the head with its restaurants and bars. The neck was also a storage area for spherical tanks of liquid oxygen to make up for any leakage. The tanks were hidden behind the walls and took up a considerable amount of room, so that only Gaia’s throat was glazed. A number of oxygen candles hung in wall holders.

Kokoschka snorted. Without resorting to the scales, he knew he had in fact put on some weight over the past few days. No wonder Sophie had been a bit stand-offish with him. He would have to work out more often, go to the gym, on the treadmill, or else his fleshly contact would be restricted to fillets, schnitzels and mince.

There was no one in Chang’e. Selene, a floor up, was also contenting itself with its own company, and so was the Luna Bar. To judge by the voices, the gang was right up at the top. Strangely, Kokoschka barely felt frightened, in spite of the possible risk of death. He couldn’t imagine an atom bomb, or an atom bomb exploding. And besides, they hadn’t found anything, and wouldn’t such a thing give off radiation? He was far more concerned about Sophie. Something had startled her. All of a sudden she had seemed absolutely terrified, and then there was that scribbled note that she had given him to give to Tim.

But Tim Orley wasn’t there. Only the Donoghues, Rebecca Hsu, Miranda Winter, and the Russian’s sad wife sat hunched over their drinks, looking dazed. Funaki said Tim had been there just before he arrived, and had asked after Lynn, while as for her, she had lost her head a few moments before.

‘And I hadn’t done anything,’ Donoghue mumbled to nobody in particular. ‘I really hadn’t.’

‘Yeah.’ Aileen looked sagely around. ‘She’s looked stressed lately, don’t you think?’

‘Lynn’s okay.’

‘Well that’s how it seemed to me. Not you? Even in the space station.’

‘Lynn’s okay,’ Chuck repeated. ‘It’s this hotel manager I can’t stand.’

‘Why not?’ Rebecca raised her eyebrows. ‘She’s just doing her job.’

‘She’s hiding something.’

‘Yes, then—’ Kokoschka made as if to leave the Mama Quilla Club. ‘Then—’

‘My experience tells me so!’ Chuck slammed his hand down on the table. ‘And my prostate. Where experience fails, my prostate knows. I’m telling you, she’s shitting the lot of us. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out that she was pulling the wool over all our eyes.’

‘Then I need to—’

‘And what are you going to surprise us with this evening, young man?’ Aileen asked in a saccharine voice.

Kokoschka ran his hand over his bald head. Amazing, just a few millimetres of scalp. How it kept producing more sweat. Layer after layer, as if he were sweating out his brain.

‘Ossobucco with risotto milanese,’ he murmured.

‘Oooh!’ said Winter. ‘I love risotto!’

‘I make it the Venetian way,’ Aileen told Kokoschka. ‘You know you constantly have to keep stirring? Never stop stirring.’

‘He’s a chef, darling,’ said Chuck.

‘I know that. May I ask where you learned your craft?’

‘Erm…’ Kokoschka squirmed, like a bug on flypaper. ‘Sylt – among other places.’

‘Oh, Sylt, wait, that’s, that’s, don’t tell me, it’s that city in northern Norway, right? Up at the top.’

‘No.’

‘It isn’t?’

‘No.’ He had to get away, find Tim. ‘An island.’

‘And who did you learn from, Alex?’ Aileen twinkled intimately at him. ‘I can say Alex, can’t I?’

‘Axel. From Johannes King. Sorry, I’ve really got to—’

‘Do you use beef marrow in your risotto?’

Kokoschka looked nervously at the stairs, a fox in a trap, a fish in a net.

‘Come on, tell us your secrets.’ Aileen smiled. ‘Sit down, Alex, Axel, sit down.’

The deeper Sophie Thiel dug into the recordings, the stranger it all seemed. Via cleverly disguised cross-connections, you reached lists of unofficial hot keys, some of them cryptic, others designed to control the hotel’s communication system. Among other things, they also blocked the laser connection between Gaia and the moon base, or more precisely they directed the signal to a mobile phone connection. By now she also thought she knew what the mysterious menu was for. It wasn’t the LPCS itself that was coming under attack, it was more that an impulse was sent to the Earth, and as far as she could tell that impulse had prompted a block that didn’t just affect lunar satellites. A lot of work had been done here; the Moon had been completely cut off from the Earth.

And suddenly she doubted that all that effort had been devoted only to the purpose of destroying the hotel.

Who were they?

Tim! She desperately hoped Tim would appear at last. Hadn’t Axel found him? She didn’t know enough to lift the block, particularly since she didn’t know what it had actually unleashed. On the other hand she was confident that she could undo the interference with the laser connection to Peary Base. She would make contact with the astronauts there and ask for help, even if it might put her life in danger, because somebody might be listening in on her, but in that case she would just lock herself away somewhere.

Lock herself away, what nonsense! Childish idea. Where are you going to lock yourself away when the bomb goes off?

She had to get out of here! They all had to get out of here!

Her fingers darted over the touchscreen, barely touching the smooth, cool surface. After a few seconds she heard footsteps, and the familiar shadow settled on her again. The lamb cutlets were going cold beside her, in silent reproach.

‘Did you find him?’ she asked, without looking up, as she corrected a command. She had to rewrite that one sequence, but perhaps it wasn’t even Axel, it was Tim.

No reply.

Sophie looked up.

As she leapt up and recoiled, sending her chair flying, she realised that she had made a crucial blunder. She should have stayed calm. She shouldn’t have turned a hair. Instead her eyes were wide with horror, revealing all her deadly knowledge.

‘You,’ Sophie whispered. ‘It’s you.’

Again, no answer. At least not in words.

Heidrun felt a little awkward as she stepped into the suite, in dressing gown and flip-flops. Unusually, but in pointed contrast to Finn, she had opted against the familiar rock-climbing match up the bridges, and instead primly pressed the lift button, as if it was the last thing that the pitiful remains of her arrogance could still manage. Aghast at what she had just surrendered, when Walo had never been unsatisfactory in that regard, she had the lift cabin carry her up to Gaia’s ribcage, away from the pool of temptation, stiff as a board, no false moves, just carefully sniffing her fingers for traces of lust. She felt as if her whole body exuded betrayal. The air in the lift struck her as heavy with clues, thick with vaginal aromas and the ozone stench of alien sperm, even though nothing had happened, at least not really, and yet –

Walo, her heart thumped. Walo, oh Walo!

She found him reading, gave him a kiss, that familiar, scratchy moustachioed kiss. He smiled.

‘Have fun?’

‘Lots,’ she said and fled to the bathroom. ‘And you? Not in the bar?’

‘I was, darling. It was only moderately bearable. Chuck’s jokes are starting to offend Aileen’s Christian sensibilities. A while ago he asked what a healthy dog and a short-sighted gynaecologist have in common.’

‘Let me guess. A wet nose?’

‘So I thought I might as well read.’

She looked at herself in the mirror, her white, violet-eyed elfin face, just as she had seen Finn’s face down below, in the merciless light of the realisation that people aged, they aged inexorably, that their once immaculate skin began to wrinkle, that she was a depressing forty-six, and had something in common with many men who tried to recapture their lost youth, something that women generally said they would never undergo: a proper midlife crisis.

If you want to grow old with someone, she thought, you shouldn’t need anyone else to make you feel younger.

And she loved Walo, she loved him so much!

Naked, she walked back into the living room, lay down on the carpet in front of him, folded her hands behind her head, stretched out a foot and tapped his left knee.

‘What are you reading there?’

He lowered the book and studied her outstretched body with a smile.

‘Whatever it was,’ he said, ‘I’ve just forgotten it.’

Tim pressed the door buzzer again.

‘Lynn? Please let me in. Let’s talk.’

No reaction. What if he was mistaken? He’d just missed her in the Mama Quilla Club, and had assumed that she had gone to her suite. But perhaps she was doing other things. What frightened him more than any bomb was the idea that she might actually be losing her mind, that she had already lost it. Crystal, too, hadn’t just been depressive, she’d increasingly lost touch with reality.

‘Lynn? If you’re there, open up.’

After a while he gave in and jumped down the bridges to the lobby, deeply concerned. He wondered what Sophie was up to. Whether the Gravedigger had uncovered the footage. At the same time his thoughts revolved around himself: Amber, Julian, bomb, Lynn, Hanna, accomplices, satellite failure, bomb, Amber, Lynn, worries that devoured one another, a madhouse.

The control centre was empty. Sophie was nowhere to be seen.

‘Sophie?’

He looked helplessly around. A bulkhead led to a back room, but when he put his finger on the sensor field, he found it was locked. He saw Dana running towards him through the lobby. She entered the control centre and looked around with a frown.

‘Have you seen Sophie?’

‘No.’

‘Is everything spiralling out of control?’ Her face darkened. ‘She was supposed to be here. Someone has to be in the control centre. I guess you haven’t bumped into Kokoschka?’

‘No.’ Tim scratched the back of his head. ‘Weird. Sophie was working on something very interesting.’

‘Which was?’

He told Dana about the authorisation program and what they’d hoped to find with it. The manager’s face was expressionless. When he had finished, she did what he too had done when he came in, and studied the monitor wall.

‘Forget it,’ said Tim. ‘There’s nothing there.’

‘No, she doesn’t seem to have got very far. Did she even install the program?’

‘I was here when she did.’

Dana walked in silence to the touchscreen, keyed in the call-codes of Ashwini Anand, Axel Kokoschka, Michio Funaki and Sophie Thiel and put all of them on a single channel. Only Ashwini and Michio replied.

‘Can anyone tell me where Sophie and Axel are?’

‘Not here,’ said Michio. Chuck’s booming bass voice could be heard in the background.

‘Not with me either,’ said Ashwini. ‘Isn’t Sophie in the control centre?’

‘No. Tell them to check in as soon as possible if you meet them. Point number two – we’re evacuating.’

‘What?’ cried Tim.

She told him to keep his voice down.

‘In five minutes I’m going to put out a message and ask our guests to make their way to the Mama Quilla Club at half past eight. You are to be there too. We’ll tell them exactly what’s going on, and then leave the hotel together.’

‘What’s happening to the Ganymede?’ Anand asked.

‘I don’t know.’ She glanced at the time. ‘We’re going to put out a radio flare for it Ganymede, which will reach it as soon as it’s within range of Gaia. They aren’t to land, but to fly on immediately to Peary Base. Not a word to the guests before eight thirty.’

‘Got it.’

‘Okay,’ said Funaki.

‘I’m not surprised about Axel Kokoschka,’ said Dana, and rang off. ‘You can never get hold of him; he’s always forgetting his phone. A great chef, a hopeless knuckle-head in every other respect. If he and Sophie haven’t appeared by eight thirty, put out a call for them.’

‘Are we really going to clear this place?’ asked Tim.

‘What would you do in my place?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You see? I do, though. Let’s not fool ourselves – our father’s been overdue for an hour and a half now, and even though we haven’t found a bomb, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t ticking away somewhere even so.’ She put a finger to her lips. ‘Hmm. Do atom bombs tick?’

‘No idea.’

‘No matter. We’ll send Nina Hedegaard to the Aristarchus Plateau and take the Lunar Express to the base.’

‘End of a pleasure trip,’ said Tim, and suddenly he became aware that his bottom lip was beginning to tremble. Amber! He fought against it and stared at his shoes. Dana let a smile play around her lips.

‘We will find Ganymede,’ she said. ‘Hey, Tim, chin up.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘I need you with a clear head right now. Go back to the bar, tell a joke, lighten the mood a bit.’

Tim gulped. ‘Chuck’s the guy in charge of jokes.’

‘Tell better ones.’

‘Mr Orley? Er – Tim?’

The fitness area was huge. Quite how huge, you discovered when you set about trying to find someone there, and Kokoschka looked conscientiously. After escaping Aileen’s suffocating curiosity, he had to face fatherly advice from Chuck. He should look for Julian’s son where men who valued high life expectation and firm abdominal muscles tended to go, and where Tim had been going every evening.

But the gyms were deserted, the tennis courts abandoned. In the steam bath, a mist of droplets mixed with tinkling Far Eastern music. Tim wasn’t in the Finnish sauna, he wasn’t pounding along a treadmill or punishing an exercise bike, in fact he seemed instead to have put all his energy into running away from Kokoschka. A moment of optimism when he heard sounds from the pool, but it made for disappointment when he discovered that only Nina Hedegaard was there, swimming lonely lengths in the crater. Tim wasn’t there, and he hadn’t been there, and what was going on, where was the Ganymede and were the satellites still sleeping?

Kokoschka concluded that Nina knew nothing about the bomb. Perhaps because in all the excitement they’d forgotten to tell her. He was tempted for a moment to put her in the picture, but tough girl Dana might have reasons for restricting the number of initiates. He was a chef, not a corrector of higher decisions, so he mumbled a word of thanks and decided to give Sophie Thiel at least an interim report.

As soon as Tim appeared in Gaia’s forehead again, the announcement came through:

‘As you will already have established, ladies and gentlemen, our schedule is rather disrupted, not least because Ganymede is late and we are unfortunately having problems with satellite communication.’ Dana’s voice sounded apathetic and toneless. ‘There is no need to worry, but I ask all of Gaia’s guests and staff members to make their way to the Mama Quilla Club at 8.30 p.m., where we will inform you about the latest state of development. Please be on time.’

‘That’s in ten minutes,’ Rebecca said in a thick voice.

‘Doesn’t sound good,’ muttered Chuck.

‘How come?’ Unimpressed, Miranda emptied down a bowl of cheese puffs. ‘She said there was no need to worry.’

‘Sure, that’s her job.’ Chuck rocked angrily back and forth, fists clenched, drumming arhythmically on the seat of his chair. ‘I’m telling you, she’s messing with us. I’ve been saying that all along!’

‘At least we’re going to be informed now,’ Aileen reassured him.

‘No, Chuck’s right,’ Olympiada observed listlessly. ‘The most reliable clue for an impending catastrophe is when higher authorities deny them.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Miranda.

‘No, we’ve got to assume the worst,’ Donoghue said to Olympiada.

Miranda plundered another bowl. ‘You guys are all so negative. Bad karma.’

‘Remember my words.’

‘Silly nonsense.’

‘I know this from my parliamentary work,’ Olympiada explained to her half-empty glass. ‘For example when we say we aren’t going to raise taxes, it means we are. And when—’

‘But we’re not in parliament,’ Tim replied, more sharply than he had meant to. ‘So far everything in this hotel has been organised very professionally, hasn’t it?’

She looked at him. ‘My husband is on Ganymede.’

‘So’s my wife.’

‘Okay, you lot can wait.’ Chuck jumped up and hurried to the stairs. ‘I’m going down there!’

‘Where’s Sophie?’

‘Mister Kokoschka!’ Dana glared at him. ‘How about being contactable for a change?’

Kokoschka flinched. He rubbed his big paws on his jacket and glanced around the control centre.

‘Sorry. I know we’re supposed to be meeting in the Mama Quilla—’

‘Get used to carrying your phone around with you. The question comes back to you. Where is Sophie?’

‘Sophie?’ Kokoschka started poking around in his left ear. ‘I thought she was here. Don’t know. Shall I start on the dinner? I’ve got to—’ He hesitated. The note seemed to be burning a hole in his jacket pocket. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know where Tim Orley is?’

‘What is this?’ A wrinkle appeared between Dana’s eyebrows. ‘A quiz show? Are we playing hide-and-seek?’

‘I’m just asking.’

‘Tim Orley should be in the bar. He went up there a few minutes ago.’

‘Okay, then—’ Kokoschka took a step back.

‘Stay where you are,’ Dana said severely. ‘Tell me again exactly where you looked this afternoon. Did you check the sauna too?’

‘Yep.’ He fidgeted around in the doorway, suddenly very worried about Sophie. What was going on?

‘Calm down,’ said Dana. ‘We’ll go up there together in a few minutes.’

The bar was filling up. Karla Kramp and Eva Borelius appeared on the stairs, followed by the Nairs and Finn, and blocked Chuck’s way as he came charging down as if pursued by the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

‘Do you know anything?’ He flashed his eyes at them.

‘No more than you do, I should think.’ Eva shrugged. ‘They want to tell us something.’

‘I hope it’s nothing bad,’ said Sushma anxiously.

‘It’ll be more than the time of day, I can promise you that,’ blustered Donoghue. ‘Something’s happened.’

‘You think?’

‘Friends, why all this speculation?’ Nair smiled. ‘In a few minutes we will know more.’

‘In a few minutes we’ll hear a load of prepared blarney,’ Chuck bellowed. ‘I could tell by looking at Lynn and all those plaster saints. You can’t fool Chucky.’

‘Who says they’re trying to fool you?’ asked Finn.

‘My experience,’ snapped Donoghue. ‘My prostate!’

‘Have you had the golden finger?’

‘Now listen, young man—’

‘What are you getting worked up about? That they’re hiding something from us? They aren’t, you know.’

‘They aren’t?’ Chuck narrowed his eyes. ‘And how do you know that?’

‘My prostate!’ Finn grinned. ‘Claptrap, Chucky. If they wanted to keep something from us, they’d hardly have called a meeting.’

‘But I don’t want to know what just anyone gets to hear.’ Chuck struck his chest with his fist. ‘I want the whole truth, you understand?’ He pushed past them. ‘And first, I’m telling you now, I’m not letting that stupid skank of a hotel manager go up there, just so as you know!’

‘Tsk, tsk.’ Karla watched after him. ‘For a hotelier, he really sounds like a grumpy guest.’

‘We’ve got to get up there,’ said Heidrun.

She was half lying on top of Ögi, half beside him, with his hairy arm under her back. As if infected by the virus of infidelity, she had forced him to make love, to receive the antidote to her own lust, and it was at the sound of Dana’s voice that she had experienced an exorbitant neuronal firework, as if it had been sparked by the hotel manager’s monotonous voice. Whatever the reason for the disturbance, Heidrun was so furious with Dana that she chose to ignore the announcement, and proceeded to do just that for a whole six minutes, with Ögi’s fingers stroking the back of her neck.

‘What time is it?’ he asked.

She rolled reluctantly onto her back and glanced at the digital display above the door.

‘Four minutes before half past eight. We could still try to be on time.’

‘What, are you crazy?’

‘It’s what people generally expect of the Swiss.’

‘Time to demolish some clichés, perhaps?’ Ögi picked up a strand of her hair. Unpigmented keratin, but in it he saw white moonlight melting between his fingers. ‘Okay, maybe you’re right, we shouldn’t dawdle. People will be getting worried.’

‘About Ganymede?’

‘About whatever. It isn’t very comforting to be invited to this kind of meeting.’

‘Motormouth told us not to worry.’

‘And you couldn’t really say we had, could you?’ He grinned and sat up. ‘Come on, mein Schatz. Let’s get into social contract mode.’

With silent, sweating Kokoschka by her side, Dana was going up. The lift stopped at the fifteenth floor. Lynn joined them. She looked dreadful, as if she’d aged several years, hardly able to focus, her eyes darting unsteadily around. A curiously distant, sly-looking smile played around the corners of her mouth.

‘What’s all this?’ she said to Dana without looking at her. She ignored Kokoschka completely.

‘What’s all what?’

‘What’s the meeting for?’

The lift doors closed.

‘We’re evacuating,’ Dana said bluntly. ‘Where have you been, Lynn? Have you seen Sophie?’

‘Sophie?’ Lynn looked at her as if she’d never heard the name before but thought it was very interesting.

‘Yes. You remember Sophie Thiel.’

‘We can’t evacuate,’ Lynn said, almost cheerfully. ‘Julian wouldn’t want that.’

‘Your father isn’t here.’

‘Call it off.’

‘Excuse me, but I think it’s exactly what he would want.’

‘No! No, no, no, no, no.’

‘Yes, Lynn.’

‘You’re messing up the whole trip.’

Kokoschka hunched his shoulders and stuck his hand in his pocket. Dana noticed and gave a start. Was he holding something in his hand?

‘You stupid bitch,’ Lynn said brightly, and the lift doors opened again.

Chuck Donoghue was waiting in the neck. He was quivering with rage. Aileen came hurrying down the stairs wearing a concerned expression. Dana came out of the lift, with Lynn and Kokoschka hot on her heels.

‘What can I do for you, Chuck?’

‘You’re taking us for idiots, aren’t you?’

‘I’m here to inform you about the state of developments.’ Dana faked a smile. ‘So could we go upstairs, please?’

‘No, we couldn’t.’

‘Please, Chucky.’ Aileen fiddled with Donoghue’s sleeve. The lift doors slid shut. ‘Listen to what she has to say.’

‘I’ll listen to it here.’

‘There’s nothing to say,’ Lynn twittered. ‘Everything’s hunky-dory. Shall we go and eat?’

‘I want to know what’s going on right now!’ snapped Donoghue. He came closer, entered her personal space. ‘Where’s Julian? Where are the others? You’ve known what’s happening for ages, why can’t we talk to anybody? You’ve known all along.’

‘Are you threatening me, Chuck?’

‘Come on. Say it.’

Dana Lawrence didn’t budge from the spot. She stared calmly into the big man’s eyes. To do so, she had to throw her head back, but inside it was as if she was looking down at Donoghue.

‘ When I’ve told you, shall we go up?’

Donoghue clearly hadn’t expected her to give in so easily. He took a step back.

‘Of course,’ Aileen hurried to reassure her in his place.

‘Yes, of course,’ Donoghue repeated lamely.

‘No!’ screamed Lynn.

Tim heard her in the Mama Quilla Club, even though the Chang’e, the Selene and the Luna Bar were in between. He heard her fear, her rage, her madness. All at once he leapt to his feet and dived down the stairs taking four at a time. Dana’s authoritarian alto joined in, counterpointed by arpeggios of high, frightened, Aileen wails, over Donoghue’s rumbling bass. He plunged down into Gaia’s throat.

Strange. His sister had pulled one of the oxygen candles from its mounting and was swinging the steel cylinder like a club, while Dana, Chuck, Aileen and Kokoschka circled her like a pack of wolves.

Tim pushed his way between the Donoghues, saw Lynn stepping back and roared, ‘What’s going on? What are you doing to her?’

‘Why don’t you ask her what she’s doing to us,’ growled Chuck.

‘Lynn—’

‘Leave me alone! Don’t get too close!’

Tim held his hand out to her. She recoiled still further, raised the candle and stared at him, eyes darting from side to side.

‘Tell me what’s going on.’

‘She wants to evacuate Gaia,’ Lynn panted. ‘That’s what’s going on. The bitch wants to evacuate Gaia.’

Kokoschka was so confused that he didn’t even try to understand what was going on. Clearly the business manager of Orley Travel was going mad. His thoughts had turned entirely to Tim and the end of his personal odyssey. He drew Sophie’s note from his pocket. ‘Mr Orley, I’ve got—’

Tim ignored him. ‘Lynn, come to your senses.’

‘She wants to evacuate the hotel.’ The woman’s voice was reduced to a whisper. ‘But I won’t let her, under any circumstances.’

‘Of course, we’ve got to talk about it. But first give me the candle.’

‘Evacuate?’ Chuck echoed, eyes rolling.

‘You should listen to your brother.’ Dana pointed at Lynn’s makeshift club. ‘You’re putting us all in danger.’

Tim knew what she meant. The cylinder contained large quantities of compressed oxygen, and Lynn’s fingers were dangerously close to the detonator. As soon as she set the exothermic reaction in motion, the contents would spread slowly into the environment, a pointless waste, along with the danger that the partial pressure of the oxygen would exceed permitted levels. The cartridges were meant for emergencies, when breathable air was in short supply.

‘Mr Orley!’ Kokoschka was waving a piece of paper.

‘What do you mean, evacuate?’ Donoghue snapped.

‘Dana’s right,’ said Tim. ‘Please, Lynn. Give me the candle.’

‘Julian doesn’t want us to evacuate,’ Lynn explained dreamily to an imaginary audience. For a second she seemed completely absent. Then her gaze settled on her brother. ‘You know that, don’t you? We mustn’t frighten Daddy’s guests, so we’ll all stay here like good boys and girls.’

‘That would suit you, wouldn’t it?’ Dana snorted.

Lynn’s dreamy expression made way for seething fury. She swung the cartridge again.

‘Tim, tell her to shut up!’

‘Oh, so I’m supposed to shut up, am I?’ Dana took a step forward. ‘What about, Lynn? Everybody here has known for ages.’

Tim looked at her in confusion. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘About how your sister manipulated the tapes. That she’s been used by Hanna. That she’s losing her marbles. Isn’t that true, Miss Orley?’

Lynn ducked down. A sly spark appeared in her eyes, then she suddenly jumped forwards and swung a blow at Dana, who effortlessly dodged it.

‘You were the one who let Hanna take his trip on the Lunar Express. Why, Lynn? Was he supposed to bring something back? To us in the hotel?’

‘Stop!’

‘You blocked the satellites. You’re paranoid, Lynn. You’re in cahoots with a criminal.’

‘What do you mean, evacuate?’ roared Chuck. He gripped Dana roughly by the shoulder. ‘I said, what do you mean, evacuate?’

The manager whirled around and knocked his hand away.

‘You shut your mouth!’

Donoghue’s massive head turned crimson. ‘You – you jumped-up chambermaid, I’ll—’

‘Chuck, no!’ pleaded Aileen.

‘Miss Orley—’ Dana repeated.

With a tormented expression on her face, Lynn shook her head. Tears were collecting on her eyelids.

‘What have you done with Sophie Thiel, Lynn?’ Dana insisted. ‘You were in the control centre not long ago.’

‘That’s not true. I’ve been—’

‘Of course you were there!’

‘Dana, that’s enough,’ hissed Tim.

‘You bet.’ Dana glared at him. ‘I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of this circus. Give up, Lynn. Tell us the truth about this bomb.’

‘Bomb?’ roared Chuck. He charged forwards like a water buffalo, pushed Lynn against the wall, stretched out his big hands and pulled the cartridge from her fingers. ‘Has everybody here gone mad?’

Lynn’s fingers bent into claws. She lashed out, drawing a bloody trail across Donoghue’s cheek. Before Chuck could recover from his amazement, she was at the stairs, jumped down and disappeared into the floor below.

‘Lynn!’ cried Tim.

‘No, wait! Please wait!’

Kokoschka watched in horror as young Orley dashed after his crazed sister. Stay here, he thought. Not again, I’ve got to give you—

‘Sophie told me to give you…’

Too late. Run after him? But the general madness required its tribute, so that he had to look on helplessly as Chuck raged at the hotel manager and stormed after her, holding the oxygen candle menacingly aloft. Storms raged inside his head, down-draughts, plunging temperatures, tornadoes, accumulated fear. Something terrible would happen. His thoughts danced around like faded leaves, blown in all directions by gusts of confusion. Every time he tried to catch them, they whirled away, while he impotently turned and turned. What was he to do? At last he caught one of those leaves, it flapped and fluttered, trying desperately to escape: that whatever Sophie had written on that piece of paper would explain the escalation that was going on in front of his eyes, that the piece of paper would tell him what he needed to do, that perhaps, seeing as how he hadn’t managed to carry out his mission, he ought to read it.

Fingers trembling, he unfolded the piece of paper.

At that moment, Dana sensed the change. Her whole body reacted. All the hairs on her forearms registered the disaster. Voices reached her from the restaurant. The tumult must have reached the upper floors, and some people were coming down to see what had happened, while Axel’s statue-like face sent out waves of disbelief and fury.

Dana slowly turned her head towards him.

The chef stared at her, a piece of paper in his left hand. His right hand slowly rose, an index finger raised in accusation. Dana took the paper from him and glanced at the words scribbled on it.

‘Rubbish,’ she said.

‘No.’ Kokoschka came closer. ‘No, not rubbish. She found out. She found out!’

‘Who found out what?’ barked Donoghue.

‘Sophie.’ Kokoschka’s finger twitched; an eyeless, sniffing creature, it swung around and rested on Dana. ‘She’s the one. Not Lynn. It’s her!’

‘You’ve been spending too much time at the oven.’ Dana stepped back. ‘Your brain’s overcooked, you great idiot.’

‘No.’ Kokoschka’s massive form started moving, a Frankenstein’s monster taking its first steps. ‘She paralysed the communications. She wants to blow us all up! She’s the one! Dana Lawrence!’

‘You’re mad!’

‘Oh, really?’ Donoghue’s eyes narrowed to slits. ‘I think we can find that one out pretty quickly.’ He picked up the oxygen cartridge and approached her from the other side. ‘I remember this great joke where—’

Dana reached into her hip pocket, drew a gun and pointed it at Donoghue’s head.

‘Here comes the punchline,’ she said, and squeezed the trigger.

Donoghue stopped dead. Brain matter spilled from the hole in his forehead, a trickle of blood ran between his eyebrows and along the bridge of his nose. The candle slipped from his hands. Aileen’s mouth gaped, and an unearthly wail issued from it. Dana was just swinging the gun around, when the doors of E2 opened and Ashwini Anand stepped out, impelled into the lion’s den by her fear of being late. The bullet struck the Indian woman before she had a chance to grasp the situation. She slumped to the ground, blocking the lift door, but her unexpected arrival had lost Dana valuable seconds, which Kokoschka exploited to go on the attack. She took aim at him and at the same moment she was attacked by Aileen, who leapt at her, grabbed her hair and pulled her head back. Aileen was still uninterruptedly wailing, a ghostly funeral lament. Dana reached behind her, trying to shake Aileen off and Kokoschka grabbed her wrist and she managed to knee him in the testicles, before firing off two shots. The chef bent double, but he managed to knock the gun from Dana’s fingers. She struck him in the throat with the edge of her hand, and shook the Fury from her back with a roll of her shoulders. Almost gracefully, Aileen sailed against her husband, who was still standing, and dragged him down with her. Kokoschka was crawling along the floor on all fours. Dana kicked him in the chest, just as she heard a metallic hiss that didn’t bode well.

The bulkheads were closing.

She stared at the holes in the wall, where the two stray bullets had struck.

The tanks! They must have hit one of the hidden tanks. Compressed oxygen was bursting out, raising the partial pressure and causing the sensors to close off access to the levels above and below. It wasn’t impossible that the external cooling pipe had been hit, releasing toxic, inflammable ammonia.

She was in a bomb.

She had to get out of here!

The invisible gas settled on the wildly flailing Aileen, on Chuck’s corpse, streamed into the open lift, whose doors were blocked by Anand’s dead body. Kokoschka’s eyes widened. Gurgling, he got to his feet and stretched out both arms towards Dana. She paid him no attention and ran off. The doors were closing at worrying speed. With one bound she reached the entrance to the suites, jumped and just managed to get past the bulkhead from Gaia’s neck, somersaulted down the stairs and landed on her back.

Kokoschka came after her. Properly trained, he knew the potentially disastrous effect of an uncontrolled release of oxygen. Desperate to get out in time, he followed Dana to the bulkhead, but didn’t get all the way through. He was trapped.

‘No, no, no, no, no…’ he whimpered.

Now he could hear the faint hiss of the escaping oxygen. Terrified, he tried to brace himself against the approaching metal plate. His breath was forced out of him, his organs crushed. He heard one of his lower ribs breaking, saw Aileen kneeling over Chuck’s corpse and burying her face in the crook of his neck. A metallic taste spread through his mouth, and his eyes bulged. He tried to shout, but all he managed was a dying croak.

‘Chuck,’ Aileen whimpered.

There was a not especially loud puffing sound as the oxygen went up. Two glowing spears of fire suddenly thrust from the wall where the bullets had hit, striking Aileen, Chuck’s corpse and Ashwini Anand’s bent body, the walls and the floor. The flames quickly swept along the lift doors, forced their way into the open cabin of the staff lift, like living creatures, fire spirits in orgiastic exuberance. A moment later half of the mezzanine was alight. Kokoschka had never seen a fire raging like that. People said that fires spread more slowly in reduced gravity, but this—

He spewed a stream of blood. The bulkhead pressed relentlessly against his tortured body, and as if the fire had only just noticed him, it reared up to new heights and seemed to pause uncertainly for a moment.

Then it leapt at him hungrily.

Miranda Winter had, with Sushma Nair, set off for the lower floors, once it could no longer be ignored that there were noisy arguments going on down there. On the stairs from Selene to Chang’e, they heard two muffled bangs in quick succession, which anyone who had ever been to the movies would have recognised as pistol shots from a silenced weapon, followed by Aileen’s bloodcurdling howl, then some bell-like chimes, as if a hammer were being struck against metal. Sushma’s expression turned to one of naked fear; Winter, however, was made of sterner stuff, so she beckoned Sushma to wait and approached the passageway through the neck.

What the—?

‘The bulkhead is closing,’ she cried. ‘Hey, they’re locking us in!’

Baffled, she stepped closer to get a glimpse through the crack of what lay below.

A figure of flame came flying at her. The demon hissed and roared at her, reached for her with sparks flying from its finger, singed her eyelids, brows and hair. She stumbled, fell and pushed herself up as she tried to get away from the raging flames.

‘Oh, shit!’ she cried. ‘Get out, Sushma, get out!’

The demon tumbled and licked its way around, multiplied, giving birth to new, twitching creatures that darted around gleefully setting ablaze anything that stood in their way. With uncanny speed they covered the glass façade, found little of interest there and concentrated their campaign on the floor, the pillars and the furniture. Miranda leapt to her feet, hurried up the stairs, driving the distraught Sushma ahead of her with a series of loud shrieks. The bulkheads to Selene were closing right above them. A wall of heat was surging at them from behind. Sushma stumbled. Miranda slapped her on the backside, and Sushma pushed her way past the bulkhead to the next floor up.

Close! Christ, that was close!

Like a gymnast, she grabbed the edge of the bulkhead and pulled herself up on it. For a moment she was afraid her ankle would get stuck in the lock, but then, by a hair, she got into Selene, and the bulkhead closed with a dull thud and saved them from the wave of fire.

‘The others,’ she panted. ‘God alive! The others!’

Dana was lying on her back, Kokoschka’s legs pedalling wildly above her, hammering the steps of the spiral staircase. The roar of the fire reached her from the neck, followed by the flames themselves, greedily creeping up Kokoschka’s jacket and trousers. They looked as if they were feeling, searching for something. They flowed in waves over the ceiling, the structure and its coverings in its quest for food.

Dana leapt to her feet.

She had to dislodge Kokoschka’s body so that the bulkhead could close. Oxygen fires were uncontrollable, hotter and more destructive than any conventional kind. Even though the gas as such didn’t burn, it fatally encouraged the destruction of all kinds of material, and it was heavier than air. The blaze would spill like lava from Gaia’s throat and engulf the entire suite section. One leap and she was at the manual control panel, crouched down to get as far as she could from the heat, and activated the mechanism that operated the bulkhead. It opened, and Kokoschka was free. He dashed down the steps and leapt onto the gallery, kicking instinctively around. Tentacles of flame shot from the gap, as if to drag back the prey that had just been snatched from them. But the bulkhead closed on them, cutting off the blaze and isolating Gaia’s neck from its shoulders.

The chef was a human torch. A fog of chemical extinguishing agents forced its way out of the ventilation system, but it wasn’t nearly enough. In a few moments, the plants, the walls, the floor would all be ablaze. Dana pulled a portable CO₂ fire extinguisher from the wall, emptied it on the body now lying motionless and then pointed what was left at the ceiling. In the inferno above her, the extinguisher system had probably given up long ago. By now the temperatures up there must be unimaginable. Sooty smoke entered her airways and blinded her eyes. Her chest began to hurt. If she didn’t get fresh air in a minute, she would die of smoke poisoning. Kokoschka and the stairs and parts of the ceiling were still smouldering away, little fires still flared here and there, but instead of trying to quell them, she staggered along the gallery, eyes streaming, unable to breathe, the creak and clatter of the bulkhead in her ears, now sealing off Gaia’s shoulder. Where the gallery ended in the figure’s right arm, there was an emergency storeroom which contained, alongside the inevitable candles, some oxygen masks. She quickly put one of the masks on, greedily sucked in the oxygen and watched as access to the arm was sealed off.

She hadn’t been fast enough.

She was trapped.

Tim managed to catch up with his sister in the hall. She’d been trying to escape across the glass bridges, leaping like a satyr but with her knees trembling, so that he was terrified he was about to watch her slip to her doom, but nothing could stop her attempt to escape. It was only at the last jump that she faltered, fell and crept away on all fours. Tim jumped down immediately behind her and grabbed her ankle. Lynn’s elbows bent. She slipped away on her belly, trying to escape him. He held her firmly, turned her on her back and received a smack in the face. Lynn panted, grunted, tried to scratch him. He gripped her wrists and forced her down.

‘No!’ he cried. ‘Stop! It’s me!’

She raged and snapped at him. It was like fighting a rabid animal. Now that her hands had been immobilised, she struck out with her legs, threw herself back and forth, then suddenly rolled her eyes and lay slack. Her breathing was fitful. For a moment he was afraid he was going to lose her to unconsciousness, then he saw her eyelids flutter. Her eyes cleared. ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’m with you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she whimpered. ‘I’m so sorry!’

She started sobbing. He let go of her wrists, took her in his arms and started rocking her like a baby.

‘Help me, Tim. Please help me.’

‘I’m here. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.’

‘No, it isn’t.’ She pressed herself against him, clawed her fingers into the fabric of his jacket. ‘I’m going mad. I’m losing my mind. I—’

The rest was drowned by fresh sobbing, and Tim felt as unprepared as a schoolboy, even though it was the terrifying spectre of this situation that had prompted him to come on Julian’s idiotic pleasure trip in the first place. But now his brain threatened to go on strike on grounds of continuous overload and abandon him to naked terror. He threw back his head and looked at the phantom of smoke in the dome of the atrium, menacingly spreading its wings. Something grew from the balconies, metal plates, enormous bulkheads, and he started to sense that something terrible was going on up there.

Cape Heraclides, Montes Jura

For the first few minutes they had made quick progress, until it turned out that the bigger boulders supported one another, and developed a curious dynamism of their own as soon as you removed one of them. Several times he and Hanna were nearly crushed by a rolling rock. Whenever Locatelli jumped out of the way at the last second, his mind came up with bold scenarios of cause and effect in which debris – guided in precise trajectories – would crush Hanna as flat as a pancake. The Achilles heel of all these plans was that nothing in the field of debris around Ganymede lent itself to precise calculation, so he resigned himself to cooperation. They carried the rubble down, alert, watching out for each other’s safety, they pushed, pulled, dragged and lifted, and after two hours of backbreaking work they reached their physical limits. Several of the colossal boulders showed some movement, to be sure, but refused to be shifted. Breathless, Locatelli leaned against one of the rocks and was amazed not to hear Hanna panting like a dog as well.

Clearly the Canadian was in better shape.

‘What now?’ he asked.

‘What indeed. We’ve got to get the hatch open.’

‘Oh really, Cleverdick? Shame it’s impossible.’

Hanna leaned down and studied the blockage. Locatelli could hear the gears whirring in his head.

‘Why don’t you chuck one of your bombs in?’ he suggested. ‘Let’s blow these bloody things up.’

‘No, the energy would disperse outside. Although—’ Hanna hesitated, stepped over and crouched down to a spot where two of the rocks touched. His hand dug into the crack in the ground and brought out some gravel. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

‘Of course I’m right,’ panted Locatelli. ‘I’m generally right. The bane and blessing of my existence. The deeper your blasted shot goes in, the more it can do.’

‘Even so, I’m not sure the explosive will be enough. The stones are enormous.’

‘But porous! This stuff’s basalt, volcanic rock. With a bit of luck bits of it will come flying off, and you’ll destabilise the whole pile.’

‘Fine,’ Hanna agreed. ‘Let’s try that.’

They began deepening and widening the channel. After an interval the Canadian disappeared inside the ship, brought out the console struts of the grasshopper, and they went on digging with that makeshift tool; they scraped and scrabbled until Hanna thought the channel was deep enough. At an appropriate distance from the Ganymede, at a slightly elevated position, they piled the smaller stones from the surroundings into a wall, lay down flat behind it, and Hanna took aim.

‘Heads down!’

Like a newborn cosmos, a grey cloud expanded among the rocks. Warren Locatelli crouched lower. Bits of rock were hitting the basalt to right and left of the wall. When he raised his head above the parapet, it looked at first as if nothing had happened. Then he saw the huge boulder at the front shifting incredibly slowly and then spinning on its own axis. The one next to it dislodged as well, pushed its neighbour aside, and immediately collapsed, sending fragments scattering down the slope.

‘Yeah!’ cried Locatelli. ‘My idea. My idea!’

The big boulder was still spinning, and when it was jostled by a third that toppled into the gap, it finally leaned over, rolled heavily a few more metres and produced a chain reaction of tumbling debris that rattled cheerfully down the hill.

‘Yeah! Yeah!’

He jumped to his feet. They leapt from their improvised trench, and shoved the remaining rubble aside. Drunk on dopamine and thrilled by their joint success, Locatelli forgot the circumstances of their enmity, as if the disputes of the past few hours had been based on a script error, in which Hanna, the good mate, had been unjustly demonised, but was now, once again, someone with whom you could run races and blow up moon mountains. They freed the hatch of the Ganymede, and Hanna gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder.

‘Well done, Warren. Very good!’

That contact, even though he barely felt it through his thick armour, brought Warren to his senses with a start. He couldn’t get so drunk on his body’s stimulants that he would actually let Hanna touch him. He had always liked the Canadian, with his moderate machismo, his monosyllabic manner, and now he thought he could discern something vaguely friendly about him, which made things even worse.

‘Let’s get it over with,’ he said roughly. ‘You open the hatch, I drive the buggy out and—’

‘No, you can take a break,’ Hanna said equably. ‘I’ll drive it out myself.’

‘Why? Do you think I’ll try and get away?’

‘Yes, that’s exactly what I think.’

And you’re right, you fucker, thought Locatelli. He had flirted with the idea. Now he had conflicted feelings. He watched Hanna as he ran up the slope, climbed the nose of the Ganymede and disappeared from view. Suddenly he was aware that the hitman didn’t need him any more. Feeling uneasy, he took a step back, as the hatch swung open and started to lower. He could see the inside of the freight space. A ramp emerged from the tipping hatch, and there was Hanna, already standing next to the buggy. He sat down in the driver’s seat, checked the controls and started. The ramp came down towards the ground, and Locatelli spotted that its rim wasn’t going to make contact. The furrow that the shuttle had made had piled the debris up too far. It stopped a good metre above the regolith. For a moment the little vehicle looked like an animal about to spring, then it came to a standstill just beyond the edge of the ramp.

Locatelli hesitated. He didn’t really know what to hope for, or what to fear. For a moment he had been worried that Hanna might simply drive on and leave him here, in the shadow of a broken-down spaceship that could no longer even be flooded with breathable air. Now, when he saw the Canadian climbing out, the source of his unease shifted to the possibility that the Canadian would proceed to make short work of him before driving off. Nervously, he took a step towards the ramp.

‘What’s up?’ asked Hanna. ‘Aren’t you coming?’

‘Coming?’ echoed Locatelli.

‘You can still be useful to me.’

Useful. Aha.

‘And for how long,’ Locatelli asked, ‘will I be useful?’

‘Until we’ve reached the American extraction station.’ Hanna pointed outside at the dusty plain. ‘When you were unconscious, I did a rough calculation of our position. What I see from here tells me that we’re stranded precisely at the tip of Cape Heraclides. That means that the station is to the north-east, in the middle of the basalt lake, where the Sinus Iridum and the Mare Imbrium meet. About a hundred kilometres from here.’

‘And why do you want to go there?’

‘The station’s automated,’ said Hanna. ‘But inspectors are always going there. A terminal was set up for them. Pressurised. A proper little base, where you could live for several months. We’ll have to rely on our own sense of direction to get there, since all the satellites are out.’

‘Turn them back on, then.’

‘What makes you think I can do that?’

‘What makes you think I’ve got shit for brains?’ barked Locatelli. ‘They all failed when you set off on your crazy little journey. Are you trying to tell me that was coincidence?’

Hanna said nothing for a few moments.

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘But it’s not in my power to correct that. We had to interrupt communication after I’d been busted, and now stop bugging me, okay? Help me to navigate and I’ll leave you at the extraction station. If you want to live—’

Hanna went on talking, but Locatelli wasn’t listening. He stared past the ramp. Something to the side of the Ganymede had attracted his attention.

‘—rid of me,’ Hanna was saying. ‘You’ve just got to—’

Why was dust swirling up where the body of the shuttle was in the regolith? Little clouds puffing up along its flank, like an approaching steam train. What was happening? The outlines of the spaceship blurred, its steel fuselage quivered. The edge of the ramp barely rose above the debris, but more dust was pouring out. The ground was trembling too.

‘—then we’ll—’

‘The shuttle’s slipping!’ yelled Locatelli.

Hanna jerked around. The Ganymede reared up, no longer stabilised by the boulders that they had blown away. A moment later it started moving again and slipped backwards, spraying up sand and gravel. Locatelli saw Hanna dash up and jump onto the ramp that was now hurtling towards them, which swept the buggy up and away; he tried to leap to safety, stumbled and fell. He was back on his feet in a moment, pushed himself away, dived to the side—

Another half-metre and he would have done it.

The moment the rim cut into his belly, he saw with crystal clarity the image of Carl Hanna who, a universe further off, had done the right thing and sought refuge in altitude. Then a searing pain erased all other thoughts. He instinctively gripped the steel, a torero impaled on the bull’s horns, shaken to the core by the downhill race of the Ganymede, which dropped one last time, pitched and slung him away in a high arc. He landed on his back several metres away, became aware that the shuttle had stopped sliding just as suddenly as it had started, wedged on a ledge of rock, saw the buggy somersaulting and Hanna leaping along the loading bed and jumping into the rubble.

He pressed both hands to his belly, as hard as he could.

Hanna came running across and bent over him. Locatelli tried to say something, but all that came out was groaning and retching. He didn’t need to look down at himself – which he couldn’t have done anyway – to know that his suit had a tiny tear in it. If he was still alive, it was only because bio-suits didn’t immediately burst like balloons, losing all their air at once.

Perhaps if he kept his hands pressed against the wound—

‘You’re bleeding,’ said Hanna.

‘Sh-shit,’ he managed to gasp. ‘Can you—?’

‘Idiot!’ How strange. The Canadian seemed to be angry. ‘What were you doing? I spared you, for God’s sake! I could have brought you to safety!’

‘I’m – I’m s—’

What? Sorry? Was he apologising to Hanna for allowing himself to be rammed in the body by the Ganymede? Whose fault was that, then, damn it? But right now he felt terribly cold, and he understood that apart from Hanna he had no one now.

‘Please – don’t – let – me—’

‘You’re going to die,’ Hanna said soberly.

‘N-no.’

‘There’s nothing to be done, Warren. The vacuum will suck you empty as soon as you take your hands away.’

Locatelli’s lips moved. Connect me to something, he wanted to say, repair the suit, but all that came out was gurgles and coughing.

‘Every second that we drag things out, you will suffer.’

Suffer? He shook his head weakly. Stupid idea, he thought as he did so. No one can see you anyway. Each saw himself reflected in the helmet of the other. Searing hooks tore at his guts. He groaned.

‘Warren?’ Hanna’s hands approached his helmet. ‘Do you hear me?’

‘Shhhh—’

‘Look at the stars. Look at the starry sky.’

‘Carl—’ he whispered. The pain was almost unbearable.

‘I’m with you. Look at the stars.’

The stars. They circled above Locatelli, sending out messages that he didn’t understand. Not yet. Oh, Christ, he thought, as Hanna busied himself with his helmet, who ever died with such an image before his eyes? How fantastic, in fact.

‘Sh – it,’ he gasped once more, still his favourite word.

His helmet was taken off.

Gaia, Vallis Alpina

However many heads Hydra had, at that moment they all had cause for the greatest concern.

And there had been problems on the horizon. The disaster of 2024 cast its long shadow, since Vic Thorn, the bacillus that they had been cultivating at such expense, had vanished into the expanses of interstellar space. More than a year of dread, month by month, during which the package frayed her nerves, as no one was able to say whether it would be able to survive that long in the lonely bleakness of the crater. Admittedly mini-nukes were almost impossible to find, as Dana Lawrence knew very well, although of course she hadn’t told the assiduous afternoon search party. The little nuclear weapons got their energy from uranium-235. They didn’t give off gamma rays like their beloved cousins, but instead produced alpha waves; even a sheet of paper was enough to dupe detectors. Nonetheless, in a stored state they gave off thermal energy that had to be dispersed somewhere or other, a process performed on Earth by the atmosphere. On the Moon, on the other hand, there were no busily circulating molecules to pick up the little packets of heat and carry them off. To counteract the overheating of an atom bomb in an airless space, you needed big radiators, which the little bomb did not possess, because it was designed to be hidden for three months after the landing of Thorn, who would have been just around the corner from it on the moon base. If everything had gone to plan, Thorn would have positioned the bomb, set the timer, headed for Earth on the pretext of sudden illness, and the rest would have been available to read in the chronicles of noteworthy disasters.

Dana looked with revulsion at Kokoschka’s charred and smoking body. At last she had managed to put out the remaining fires. She couldn’t imagine what kind of inferno was currently raging in Gaia’s sealed-off neck, but there too the flames must already have consumed much of the oxygen that had been there at the outset. The life-saving mask filled her lungs with oxygen, and a visual barrier protected her eyes against the stinging smoke, but the real problem was that she wasn’t going to get out of here very quickly.

And all because of Julian’s crazy daughter!

What the hell was up with Lynn? Never, not during her interviews for the job, and not afterwards, either, had she ever given the impression of being mad. Controlling, certainly. Almost pathological in her striving for perfection, but she also seemed to be more or less perfect. Even until a few days previously, Dana wouldn’t have been able to say anything else about Lynn Orley, except that she was the legitimate architect of three extraordinary hotels, and completely capable of running a global company.

Then, as a complete surprise, the first symptoms of paranoia had appeared and, initially uneasy, Dana had seen a certain potential in them, because the change in Lynn’s nature predestined Lynn for the role of scapegoat. She hadn’t let an opportunity pass to discredit Julian’s daughter and feed suspicions of her dishonesty. But back in the Mama Quilla Club, with Donoghue bellowing in her ear, she had suddenly been filled with the worry that Lynn might spoil everything. For the sake of caution she had followed her, but Lynn had only withdrawn to her suite, so she had gone on to the control centre, to find Sophie Thiel, incapable of any kind of dissemblance, eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Weak nerves, that one, although she deserved to be admired for her meticulous detective work. Dana’s only mistake had promptly become an albatross – not immediately manipulating the recordings after she’d sent the search parties off on their wild goose chase. With a single glance Sophie had worked out that her boss had started the communications block during the conference call between Earth and Moon, on the pretext of loading the video of the corridor. Clever, Sophie, really clever. Aware that digital messengers were terribly indiscreet, Sophie had relied on pen, paper and Kokoschka, and given the infatuated lunkhead the task of looking for Tim, to tell him who the real enemy was. It was only chance that she had ended up in the control centre at the right time; otherwise she might have been unmasked even sooner.

Now the recordings had been corrected, although that probably didn’t matter any more. The opportunity to lock both guests and staff away in Gaia’s head on the pretext of a meeting, and turn their air off, so that she could head for Peary Base, had been irrevocably missed. She was trapped.

Dana breathed deeply into her mask.

The circulators hummed around her. They did battle with the sooty remains of the flames, sucked up the toxic components and pumped fresh oxygen into the wing. More in a spirit of sportsmanship than anything else, Dana got to work on the bulkhead beyond which escalators led down Gaia’s arm into the lower levels, turned on the automatic settings, tried muscle power, with no success. And how could it have worked? In the hermetically sealed area, the partial destruction of the oxygen had produced a slight but serious reduction in pressure. Until it was resolved, the armour plating wasn’t going to budge an inch. She could safely ignore the bulkhead opposite, behind which lay Gaia’s uncontaminated half. It would take at least two hours until pressure was restored. Time enough to wonder about how that bloody detective had managed to penetrate Hydra’s data banks. Any other setbacks could have been coped with, for example the bomb sustaining damage when it fell into the crater, or Julian’s unexpected appearance in the corridor when Hanna had come back from his night-time excursion. Dana had manipulated the data, and skilfully blurred all the traces. No reason for panic.

But then everything had spun out of control.

At the same time, Hydra seemed to have emerged strengthened from its setback with Thorn, and they had agreed to give it a second try, with a team this time. No one was being recruited from NASA now. Thorn had been a happy chance: a generally popular bastard, yet in spite of his ostentatious joviality he was nobody’s mate, and was free of any moral principles whatsoever. Years ago, Hydra had sensed his corruptibility; when he had still been training in simulators on Earth, they had observed him and finally made him an offer that he, by now elevated to the rank of moon base commander, had turned down without a flicker of an eyelash, but also with a request for double the money. When this turned out not to be a problem, everything else had gone like clockwork. In the jungle of Equatorial Guinea, work was coming to an end, Hydra’s buyers had been successful in the black market of international terrorism. A masterpiece of criminal logistics was taking shape, conceived by a phantom that Dana had never met, but whose master of ceremonies she knew very well.

Kenny Xin, the crazed prince of darkness.

Even though he was the very model of a psychopath, and she found him in many respects unappealing, Dana could not conceal a certain admiration for him. For the architecture of the conspiracy of which she had been a part for years, crossing continental and cosmic bridges, Hydra couldn’t have wished for a better stress analyst. Immediately after Thorn’s death, Xin, more familiar than anyone else with the pandemonium of freelance spies, ex-Secret Service men and contract killers, had engaged in a conversation with Dana – a former Mossad agent, specialising in the infiltration of luxury hotels, which meant that she was particularly qualified for Gaia – and had also come up with the ideal cover of a Canadian investor to win Julian’s trust.

But judging by events, the prince of darkness had lost control of the situation.

Dana wondered if there was anyone still alive in the hotel. The area that she was trapped in looked deserted, but she didn’t know who had been in Gaia’s head when the oxygen had gone up. If luck had been on her side, they would all have been there. Not that she had any particular predilection for mass murder, but the group’s fate had been sealed the minute Carl Hanna’s cover had been blown. Dana was sure that the man would reach the moon base, but she couldn’t know when and whether she would be able to contact him. By blocking communications, she had tried to allow him a little time; however, if Jennifer Shaw and that detective managed to contact Peary Base via NASA, it would be a real disaster. Hanna had a better chance of carrying out his mission if there was no one waiting at the North Pole to stop him.

The idea of the communications block had also been a well-aimed and timely arrow from Kenny Xin’s inexhaustible quiver of far-sighted ideas. Sending the staff off in search of the bomb had been a doddle. Like listening in on Tommy Wachowski, the deputy commander of the base, although of course not asking him for help in the search for the Ganymede. To her great relief, they had known nothing at the Pole about a planned attack, a clear indication that neither Jennifer Shaw nor NASA had been able to get a warning to them before communications had broken down. Then she had manipulated the laser connection so that calls from the base were received only on her phone. Now she just had to wait until Hanna called, and leave the hotel for good.

But first she would have to get rid of the guests. With the best will in the world, she couldn’t send that crowd to the Pole and risk them getting there before Hanna and telling stories about atom bombs. No one from the group must reach the base.

Who had survived?

Lynn, she thought. And Tim. Those two at least. They were somewhere in the hotel, possibly in the control centre.

Time to make contact.

Cape Heraclides, Montes Jura

The behaviour of bodies in a vacuum has always inspired vivid speculation. Some of these stories correspond to fact. Objects of soft consistency with air pockets, for example, stretch apart like dough as the gas forces its way out. This isn’t caused by the vacuum sucking it out, but by the atmosphere exerting pressure. Some things deform, others explode. Frothy, chocolate-coated marshmallows balloon up to four times their volume. If the original ambient pressure were then to be reinstated, they would transform into shapeless grease, indicating profound structural dilapidation. A knotted condom, however, would regain its original form after a temporary existence as a balloon. Of course, it certainly wouldn’t be advisable to use it for its originally intended purpose. A cow’s lung would collapse into shreds, while holey cheese and aubergines would show no visible change, and nor would chickens’ eggs. Beer foams up like crazy, pommes frites secrete fat and solidify, and ketchup sachets buckle.

When it comes to human beings, the rumour stubbornly persists that we would explode if exposed to a vacuum. After all, we’re more like marshmallows than condoms in consistency: soft, porous, and interwoven with gases and fluids. And yet, something much more complex happened when Warren Locatelli’s helmet came off. Pressurised water in deep-sea trenches on Earth doesn’t start to boil until it reaches 200 to 300 degrees Celsius, whereas in the rarefied air of Mount Everest it would start to boil at 70 degrees; on the same principle, the liquid components in Locatelli’s skull boiled within a fraction of a second of being exposed to a complete lack of pressure, then immediately cooled again due to the induced loss of energy. Anything that vaporises in a vacuum creates evaporative cooling, so the now liquefied Locatelli froze as soon as he had boiled. His skull didn’t explode, but his physiognomy went through rapid changes and left behind a mask-like grimace, coated with a thin layer of ice. As he was in the shadow of a rock overhang, the ice would stay until the beams of light stretched across and evaporated it. Lastly, Locatelli would suffer terrible sunburn, but luckily he wouldn’t feel a thing. He died so suddenly that the last thing he noticed was the beauty of the starlit sky.

Hanna sat up straight.

It was just as he had said. The act of killing was neither a burden nor a source of pleasure. His victims never came back to haunt him in his sleep. If he had been convinced that Locatelli posed a danger to him, he would have shot him. But at some point in the course of the last two hours, he had become convinced that he didn’t need to. Locatelli’s bravery had won his respect, and even though the guy had been a pompous, arrogant jerk, Hanna had developed something akin to a fondness for him, accompanied by the desire to protect him. The prospect of saving Locatelli’s life had, in some indefinable way, done him good.

At least he had saved him from suffering.

He turned away and erased the dead man from his memory. He had to finish the job.

The buggy lay on its side, having been pushed against the rock face by the Ganymede. Hanna heaved the vehicle back upright and inspected it. He immediately noticed that one of the axles had been so badly damaged that the question was not whether it would break, but when. He could only hope that the buggy would hold out until he reached the mining station.

Without giving Locatelli or the shuttle another glance, he drove off.

Gaia, Vallis Alpina

It was unbelievable, thought Finn O’Keefe, how deathly pale Mukesh suddenly looked. Incomprehensible that someone whose natural pigmentation resembled that of Italian espresso could ever look so pale. His blood-drained face was as empty as the words he used in a vain attempt to raise their morale.

‘They’ll come for us, Sushma, don’t worry.’

‘Who’s “they”?’

‘You know, our friend Funaki—’

‘No, Mukesh, there’s no one left, he can’t get hold of anyone!’ Sushma began to sob. ‘No one’s answering at the control centre, and it’s on fire, everything’s in flames down there!’

How strange. O’Keefe couldn’t stop staring at Mukesh. Particularly his nose. It was as though it had gone numb, a pale radish stuck onto Mr Tomato’s face. The subject of his interest laid his arm protectively around Sushma’s shoulders.

‘He’ll get in touch with someone, my love. I’m sure of it.’

‘Has it got a little warmer already?’ Rebecca Hsu’s brow was wrinkled with alarm. ‘By a few degrees?’

‘No,’ said Eva Borelius.

‘Well, I think it has.’

‘You’ve probably got warmer, Rebecca.’ Karla Kramp went over to the landing and looked down. ‘A side effect of stress hormones, increased blood pressure. It’s completely normal at your age.’

O’Keefe followed her. Two storeys below, the spiral staircase ended at a steel barrier.

‘Perhaps we should try to open the bulkheads,’ he suggested.

Funaki looked over at them and shook his head.

‘As long as the indicators on the control panel are still lit red, we’d better leave it alone. There’s a risk of fatality.’

‘But why?’ Miranda fished a strawberry out of her daiquiri and sucked the fruit pulp from its little green star. ‘The automatic system has shut down, so it should be okay for us to take a look, shouldn’t it?’ Her skin was reminiscent of cooked lobster; her face and cleavage glowing. Her chemical-saturated hair had been badly singed above the forehead, and even her eyebrows were damaged. Regardless of all that, she exuded the kind of confidence found only in people who are either especially superior or especially simple.

‘It’s not that easy,’ said Funaki.

‘Nonsense.’ She licked strawberry juices from the corner of her mouth. ‘Just a quick look. If it’s still burning, we’ll close up again quickly.’

‘You wouldn’t even be able to get the bulkheads open.’

‘Finn has strong muscles, and Mukesh—’

‘It has nothing to do with body strength. Not when the partial pressure of the oxygen has dropped.’

‘I see.’ Miranda raised what remained of her eyebrows in interest. ‘Wasn’t he one of the Arthurian knights?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Partial.’

‘Percival,’ said Olympiada Rogacheva wearily.

‘Oh, that’s right. So what does he have to do with our oxygen?’

‘Michio, you old Samurai,’ O’Keefe turned round. ‘Please be so kind as to talk in a way that the billionairess can understand you. I think you meant to say that there’s now a vacuum on the other side, right? Which means we need to think of another way of getting out of here.’

‘But how?’ Eva looked at him helplessly. ‘Without the elevator.’

They had climbed down to Selene in order to inspect the staff elevator, the only one of the three lifts that went through into the restaurant area, but Funaki had energetically intervened:

‘Not until the system or control centre signal that it’s safe! We don’t know what’s happening in the elevator shaft. If you don’t want to be hit by a wall of flames, then don’t even think about opening those doors.’

But the control centre still hadn’t been in touch.

‘If we need to we can climb down through the ventilation shaft,’ he had added. ‘It’s not the most comfortable of methods, but it’s safe.’

A while had passed since then. Karla looked back down into the worm casing of the spiral staircase.

‘Well, I’m certainly not going to let myself get roasted up here,’ she decided.

‘Roasted?’ Hsu’s eyes widened in horror. ‘Why? Do you mean that—’

‘Karla,’ whispered Eva. ‘Do you have to?’

‘What?’ Karla whispered back in German. ‘There’s nothing but stars above us. We can’t get to the viewing platform without spacesuits, and everything’s burning down below. Fire has a tendency to rise, you know. If Funaki doesn’t make contact with the control centre soon, we’ll all meet our maker up here, mark my words. I want to get out of here.’

‘We all want to get out of here, but—’

‘Michio!’ A distorted voice came out of the intercom in the bar. ‘Michio, can you hear me? It’s Tim. Tim Orley!’

Maybe he’d got his priorities wrong. He should have ignored Lynn’s misery and made contact with the others without delay, but in the face of her suffering that had seemed an unbearable prospect. The level of her sobbing seemed to indicate that the medication she had taken was helping a little. He had fetched the elevator at once, calling it down from the very top in order to go to her suite on the thirteenth floor with her. At first, only his subconscious registered the fact that it was unusually warm in the cabin. It was only once they reached the glass bridge that he had remembered the worrying noises from the neck of Gaia, the phantom of smoke in the dome of the atrium and how the architecture seemed, bizarrely, to be in motion. Then he had looked up at the ceiling.

A massive armour shield was stretched out above him.

Perplexed, he wondered where the steel panels and bulkheads had come from all of a sudden. They must have been stored between the floors, hidden from view.

What on earth had happened up there?

By the time they got to the bathroom, Lynn was shaking so much that he had to lay the green tablets and white capsules she asked for on her tongue, one after another, and hold the glass for her as she drank, panting, like a little child. The resulting coughing fit gave reason to fear that she might bring up the cocktail of medicine again in a projectile arc, but then it had begun to take effect. A quarter of an hour later, she had got a grip of herself; at least enough to allow them to leave the suite. They immediately ran into Heidrun and Walo Ögi.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked the Swiss man in a concerned voice as he looked around. ‘Where are the others?’

‘Up there,’ whispered Lynn. Based on the colour of her skin, she could have passed for Heidrun’s sister.

‘We’ve been up there,’ said Ögi. ‘We wanted to go to the meeting, but everything’s locked up and barricaded.’

‘Barricaded?’

‘I think you’d better come with us,’ said Heidrun.

It was only as they went further up that Tim realised just how extensive the armour plating really was. A solid steel wall without even the slightest hint of a gap had descended diagonally over the gallery. The doors of E2, one of the two guest elevators, had disappeared behind it, as had the left-hand side entrance to the neck. The one accessible spiral staircase ended in a closed bulkhead. It was only now that he realised his vision was imperceptibly impaired, as if some wafer-thin film had been pulled over his retina. Here and there, black bits of fluff were spinning through the air. He reached out to catch some and they crumbled into grease between his fingers.

‘Soot,’ he said.

‘Do you smell that?’ Ögi was snuffling all around, his moustache twitching. ‘Like something’s burnt.’

Horror crept over him. If the bulkheads were closed, then that could only mean it was still burning! Filled with dread, they rode down and could already hear Funaki’s urgent calls by the time they reached the lobby. Lynn shuffled over to the controls, activated the speech function, waved her brother over wearily and sank down into one of the rolling chairs.

‘Michio!’ called Tim breathlessly. ‘Michio, can you hear me? Tim here! Tim Orley!’

‘Mr Orley!’ Funaki’s relief was palpable. ‘We thought no one would ever answer. I’ve been trying to reach someone for half an hour.’

‘I’m sorry, we had to – we had a few problems to solve.’

‘Where’s Miss Dana?’

‘Not here.’

‘Sophie?’

‘She’s not here either, none of the staff are. Just the Ögis, my sister and I.’

Funaki fell silent for a moment. ‘Then I fear you’ll have even more problems to solve, Tim. We’re stuck up here.’

‘What happened—’

‘Control centre!’ Dana’s voice. ‘Please respond.’

‘Excuse me a moment, Michio.’ Wrinkling his brow, he tried to orientate between the two flashing indicators. ‘I’ll be back in just a moment – I have Dana Lawrence – just a moment, for God’s sake, how do I switch over?’

His sister heaved herself up from the chair with a blank expression, pushed him aside and tapped a flashing section of the controls.

‘Dana? It’s Lynn here.’

‘Lynn! Finally. I’ve been trying for half an hour—’

‘You can save the speech, Funaki already did it. Where are you?’

‘Locked in. In the right shoulder.’

‘Fine, we’ll be in touch. Stand by.’

‘But I have to—’

‘Shut your mouth, Dana. Just wait until someone’s ready to play with you.’

‘What did you say?’ Dana exploded.

‘Oh yes, and you’re fired. Michio?’ Lynn put the enraged hotel director on hold. ‘This is Lynn Orley. Can you tell me your location?’

‘Okay, yes. The Mama Quilla Club, the Luna Bar and the Selene are accessible, but the Chang’e is sealed off. According to the computer the conditions beneath are life-threatening. A fire in the neck of the automatic system must have caused the area to be sealed off. Miss Miranda saw a jet of flame—’

‘Saw one?’ They heard Miranda’s penetrating voice in the background. ‘I was practically barbecued by it.’

‘—and only just managed to get away.’

Lynn leaned heavily against the control console. To Tim, she looked like a zombie trying to do something its body was no longer capable of.

‘Who was in the neck when the fire broke out?’ she asked, her voice flat.

‘We’re not entirely sure. It seems like there was an argument there. The Donoghues left the bar to find out, and we heard Miss Dana’s voice, and—’ He hesitated. ‘And yours, Miss Orley. Sumimasen, but you probably know better yourself who was there.’

Lynn fell silent for a few seconds.

‘Yes, I know,’ she said softly. ‘At least for the time before I – left. Your observations are correct. Just after Tim and I left, it must have—’ She cleared her throat. ‘Who’s with you right now?’

Funaki said nine names and assured her that, apart from Miranda’s minor burns, they were all uninjured. Tim shuddered at the thought of the neck, now completely sealed off. He didn’t dare imagine what fate had befallen Chuck, Aileen and the chef.

‘Thanks, Michio.’ Lynn’s fingers wandered over the touchscreen, altering controls, changing parameters.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Tim.

‘I’m stopping the convection in the elevator section and in the ventilation shafts.’

‘Convection?’ echoed Ögi.

‘The air circulation. There could be massive amounts of smoke forming up there. We have to stop the ventilators from distributing it and encouraging the fire to spread. Dana?’

‘Lynn, damn it! You can’t do this to me, I—’

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened?’

‘I – listen, I’m sorry if I accused you of being in the wrong, but everything indicated that you were the one we were looking for. I’m responsible for the safety of the hotel, so that’s why—’

‘You were.’

‘I had no other choice. And you have to admit that your recent behaviour hasn’t exactly been normal.’ Dana hesitated. As she continued, her voice suddenly sounded sympathetic, as if there should be a leather psychologist’s chair and a diploma on the wall. ‘No one is angry with you. Anyone can stumble now and then, but maybe you’re ill, Lynn. Maybe you need help. Are you sure you still have things under control? Would you have trusted you?’

For a moment, the incapacitating tone seemed to be taking effect. Lynn sank her head and breathed deeply. Then she stiffened and jutted her chin out.

‘The only thing I need to know is that I have you under control, you scheming little bitch.’

‘No, Lynn, you don’t understand, I—’

‘You won’t do this to me twice, do you hear?’

‘I just want to—’

‘Shut it. What happened in the neck?’

‘But that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you the whole time.’

‘What then?’

‘Kokoschka. He betrayed you! It was him.’

‘Ko-Kokoschka?’

‘Yes! He was Hanna’s accomplice.’

‘Dana!’ Tim walked over. ‘It’s me. Are you sure about that? I think he wanted to give me something.’

‘No idea what, but that’s right, yes. He got really angry when you didn’t pay attention to him, it seemed things didn’t go as he had imagined. Then – right after you and Lyn left the neck, Anand appeared. I don’t know exactly what she had found out and how, but she said straight to Kokoschka’s face that he was the agent, and Kokoschka, my God… he just snapped. He pulled out a gun and shot her, then Chuck and Aileen too, everything happened so horribly quickly. I tried to knock the gun out of his hand, and it went off, then one of the oxygen tanks suddenly started spitting out fire and – I just ran, just got out, before the bulkheads closed. He came after me, but he didn’t make it. He burned. The gallery burned, everything. I—’ Dana’s voice ebbed away. As she continued, her attempt to control her emotions was audible. ‘I managed to get him out and close the bulkhead, to extinguish the flames, but—’

‘What is it? Are you okay?’

‘Yes, thank you, Tim.’ There was a muffled cough. ‘I’ve probably inhaled a little too much CO₂ into my lungs, but I’m okay. I’ll keep myself going with oxygen masks until the pressure comes back and the bulkheads open.’

‘And – Kokoschka?’

‘Dead. I couldn’t get anything else out of him. Unfortunately.’

Silent horror and complete incomprehension descended over Heidrun and Walo’s faces. Lynn stepped away from the console, swayed a little, staggered and then crashed down into the chair.

‘It’s my fault,’ she whispered. ‘All of this is my fault.’

Nina Hedegaard had long suspected that Julian might be a reincarnation of the Comte de Saint-Germain: the alchemist and adventurer regarded as ‘immortal and all-knowing’, as Voltaire once wrote to Frederick the Great, and whose mysterious elixirs and essences he had wanted to use in order to unleash the lasting strength and stamina of a thirty-year-old. During her two semesters of studying history – which she passed inadvertently due to the blossoming of a brief liaison with a historian – the mysterious count had been Nina’s favourite figure. An ingenious gambler, companion to Casanova and teacher to Cagliostro, even the pompadours hung on his every word, because he claimed to be in possession of an acqua benedetta, a potion which stopped the ageing process. Born sometime in the early eighteenth century, official date of death 1784; biographers swore blind that they still found traces of him in the nineteenth century. Rich, eloquent, charming and – behind the façade of wanting to make the world a better place – thoroughly unscrupulous, it could only be Julian! The twenty-first-century Comte de Saint-Germain had created a space station and hotel on the Moon, making gold out of earth just as he had since time began, this time by transforming his alchemical genius helium-3 into energy, creating carbon tubes instead of diamonds, making a fool of the world and breaking the heart of a petite Danish pilot.

Exhausted from self-pity and six consecutive nights of sex, unproductive conversations about a future together, more sex, brooding wakefulness and a mere three hours of sleep, she felt so close to fainting that she had finally been tempted away from the pool and into the chill-out room. She didn’t feel the slightest desire to have another opulent dinner in Selene, play-acting the sweet travel guide. She’d had enough. Either Julian went public about their relationship while they were still on the Moon, or he could rot alone on the Aristarchus Plateau. Her bad mood swelled into a reservoir of rage. So they couldn’t make contact? There was no response from Ganymede? The last sighting of the count was in 2025? Well, so what! It wasn’t her responsibility to keep checking up and searching. She was completely worn out, and now she didn’t even want Julian to find her – if he ever turned up again. In reality, she wanted nothing more than for him to find her, but just not right now. She wanted him to go out of his mind with worry first. To beat his fists into the empty pillow beside him. Miss her. Simmer in his guilt. Yes, that’s what he should do!

Similar to the design of the pool, the chill-out area was modelled on the surface of the Moon, full of little craters and secluded corners. Her bathrobe slung around her, she selected a discreetly located lounger, perfectly suited to not being found, stretched out on it and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep in just a matter of minutes. Breathing evenly, away from the gaze of possible search parties, she rested at the very base of all consciousness. Removed from time and reality, lured into the waiting room of death, she snored softly and felt nothing but heavenly peace, and then not even that.

Four storeys above her, hell was bubbling away.

Even though Gaia in its intact state resembled a youthful, perfectly functioning organism, whose life-support systems predestined it for heroic acts, gold medals and immortality, a few stray projectiles from a handgun had been enough to turn all the advantages of its systems and sub-systems against it in the blink of an eye. The hidden tanks, designed to offset shortages in the bio-regenerative circulation by pumping the most accurately gauged quantities of oxygen into the atmosphere, had revealed themselves to be a fatal weakness. Twenty minutes after the catastrophe had struck, the affected tank was already burnt out, while other systems, originally intended to be life-saving, gave the hellfire new nourishment. By this point, the sealed-off area had temperatures of over 1000 degrees Celsius. The casing on the oxygen candles had melted and liberated their contents, burning coolants had caused the pipelines to explode, and supposedly non-flammable wall casings were flowing down like glowing slurry. Unlike in the Earth’s gravitational pull, the blaze didn’t flare up high, but instead drifted curiously around, creeping into every corner, including the cabin of E2, the guest elevator, the doors of which hadn’t managed to shut in time because Anand’s collapsed body was blocking them. Only tarry clumps and bones remained of the three corpses; everything else had been swallowed up by the flame monster. Human tissue, synthetic materials, plants, and still its hunger was far from sated. While the prisoners in the Mama Quilla Club were planning their escape with Lynn and Tim, while Dana Lawrence was foaming with rage, hammering against the closed bulkhead, and while Nina Hedegaard was sleeping through the destruction, the flames raged against a second tank, until eventually its sealing couldn’t hold out any more and a further twenty litres of compressed oxygen unleashed the next phase of the inferno. In the absence of other materials, the monster began to gnaw at the security glass of the window and at the steel brace which held Gaia’s neck upright, weakening its structural solidarity.

At a quarter past nine, the first load-bearing constructions slowly began to give way.

‘No, it was absolutely right not to use the elevator,’ they heard Lynn say through the intercom system. She sounded tired and drained, robbed of all her strength. ‘The problem is that we can only make assumptions from down here. The sensors in the neck have failed; it’s possible that it’s still burning down there. The fire-extinguishing system was clearly able to make some progress in Chang’e, but there’s still contamination and considerable vacuum pressure. Almost all the oxygen has gone to blazes. I imagine the ventilators will balance that out in the course of the next two hours, just like in the shoulder area.’

‘But we can’t wait two hours,’ said Funaki, with a sideways glance at Rebecca Hsu. ‘And it’s getting hotter in here too.’

‘Okay, then—’

‘What about the ventilator shafts? We could climb down over the staircase.’

‘The data for that is contradictory. There seems to have been a slight loss of pressure in the eastern shaft, but that might just be because a little bit of smoke forced its way in. The western shaft looks okay. As far as the guest elevators are concerned, E2 has broken down, its cabin is stuck in the neck, and the staff elevator is in the cellar. E1 is in the lobby, near us. We’ve used it several times without any problems.’

‘E1 won’t be of much help to us,’ said Funaki. ‘It stops in the neck. If we’re going to use anything it can only be the staff elevator – that’s the only one that goes through to Selene.’

‘Just a moment.’

Muffled voices could be heard in the control centre. First Tim’s, then Walo Ögi’s.

‘I’d like to remind you that E1 and E2 are a good distance apart,’ Funaki added. ‘If E2 has been compromised, that doesn’t affect E1. The staff elevator, on the other hand, travels between the two, and would get very close to E2.’

‘Lynn?’ O’Keefe leaned over the intercom. ‘Could the fire spread to the other elevator shafts?’

‘In principle, no.’ She hesitated. ‘The likelihood is very slim. The shaft system is connected via passageways, but structured in such a way that flames and smoke can’t spread that quickly. And besides, the shaft itself is inflammable.’

‘What does “that quickly” mean exactly?’ asked Eva Borelius.

‘It means that we should test it,’ said Lynn with a steady voice. ‘We’ll send the staff elevator up to you. If the system considers it to be safe, its doors would open in Selene. After that we’ll call it back, look inside, and if there’s nothing to suggest otherwise, we’ll send it up again. Then you should be able to actually use it.’

O’Keefe exchanged glances with Funaki and tried to make eye contact with the others. Sushma was frozen in a state of fear, Olympiada was gnawing at her lower lip, and Karla and Eva were signalling their agreement.

‘Sounds sensible,’ said Mukesh.

‘Yes.’ A nervous laugh escaped from Karla. ‘Better than smoke-filled ventilation shafts.’

‘Okay,’ decided Funaki. ‘So let’s do it.’

‘Nothing can shock me now anyway,’ warbled Miranda.

The re-enlivening effect of having a plan seeped into the bloodstream of the small group and motivated them to climb down to Selene, where the temperatures were significantly higher. Funaki threw a precautionary glance at the bulkheads on the floor. There was nothing to suggest that smoke or flames were making their way upwards.

They waited. After a short while they heard the elevator approaching. For what felt like an eternity, the doors remained closed, then finally glided silently apart.

The cabin looked the same as it always did.

Funaki took a step inside and looked around.

‘It looks good. Very good even.’

‘Mukesh.’ Sushma grabbed her husband’s upper arm and looked at him pleadingly. ‘Did you hear what he said? We could go now—’

‘No, no.’ Funaki, with one leg still in the cabin, turned around hurriedly and shook his head. ‘We’re supposed to send it down empty. Just like Miss Orley said.’

‘But it’s fine.’ Sushma’s shoulders were quivering with tension. ‘It’s intact, isn’t it? Every time we send it back and forth, it could only get more dangerous. I want to go down now, please, Mukesh.’

‘Oh, honey, I don’t know.’ Mukesh looked at Funaki uncertainly. ‘If Michio says—’

‘It’s my decision!’

The Japanese man pulled a face and scratched himself behind the ear.

‘I’m in,’ said Karla. ‘I agree.’

‘What, you want to go down now?’ asked Eva. ‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’

‘What is there to debate? The cabin made it up, so it will make it back down again too. Sushma’s right.’

‘I’m coming in any case,’ said Hsu. ‘Finn?’

O’Keefe shook his head.

‘I’m staying here.’

‘Me too,’ said Olympiada.

Funaki looked helplessly at Miranda Winter. She ran her hands through the singed tips of her hair and pinched her nose.

‘So, the thing is, I believe in voices,’ she said, rolling her eyes towards the ceiling. ‘Voices from the universe, you know – sometimes you have to listen really closely, then the universe speaks to you and tells you what you have to do.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Karla.

‘You have to listen with your whole body of course.’

O’Keefe gave her a friendly nod. ‘And what does it say, the cosmos?’

‘To wait. I mean, that I should wait!’ she hurried to confirm. ‘It can only speak for me after all.’

‘Of course.’

‘We’re losing time,’ urged Funaki. ‘They’ve already called the elevator back down again. The light’s flashing.’

Mukesh grasped Sushma’s hand.

‘Come on’ he said.

They walked past Funaki into the cabin, followed by Hsu, Karla and Eva, who peered in sceptically.

‘You’re coming too?’ asked Karla, surprised.

‘Do you think I’m going to let you go down by yourselves?’

‘It’s best if you stay in Selene.’ Mukesh called out to those staying behind. ‘We’ll send the elevator back right away.’

The doors closed.

Am I too cautious? wondered O’Keefe. When all is said and done, am I just a coward?

Suddenly the disquieting feeling crept over him that he’d just thrown away his last chance of getting out of here alive.

‘It’s awful,’ said Eva softly. ‘When I think of how Aileen and Chuck—’

‘Don’t think about it then,’ said Karla, staring straight ahead.

The cabin set itself in motion.

‘It’s moving,’ commented Hsu.

‘I just hope it will a second time too,’ said Sushma, concerned. ‘The others should have come with us.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Mukesh reassured her. ‘It will.’

The familiar feeling of weight loss set in. The elevator sped up, past—

—the cabin of E2, the interior of which was shimmering with red-yellow embers as the oxygen tank incessantly spat flames out into the wasteland of the neck. Inside the lift it was getting hotter and hotter. In spite of their density, the panes of the glazed section at the front were straining to brace themselves against the fire, but in vain, as the pressure began to shift to the inside and forced the components of the cabin slowly but steadily apart. The elevator shafts were separated from one another by thin, longitudinal walls, that were pierced by passageways a metre square. Contrary to their outer appearance, they were incredibly robust, made of mooncrete and designed to stand up to even heavy loads.

Not as heavy as this, though, admittedly.

For over three-quarters of an hour, ferrostatic tension had been building up inside the cabin. Now that the tolerable maximum had been exceeded, it exploded with such destructive force that one of the side casings split off with a deafening noise, smashed the shaft wall into pieces and spread out like shrapnel into the neighbouring shaft, making the staff elevator come to a jolting standstill.

It stopped so abruptly that its passengers were torn off their feet, shot up weight-lessly, banged their heads together and tumbled down wildly. In the next moment, something crashed down onto the roof, making the cabin shake heftily.

‘What was that?’ Sushma sat up and looked around, her eyes wide. ‘What happened?’

‘We’re stuck!’

‘Mukesh?’ Panic rippled through her voice. ‘I want to get out. I want to get out immediately.’

‘Calm down, my love, I’m sure everything is—’

‘I want to get out. I want to get out!’

He took her arm and spoke to her insistently, quickly and under his breath. One after another, they clambered to their feet, their faces pale and anxious.

‘Did you hear that crash?’ Hsu stared up at the roof of the cabin.

‘But we were already past it,’ Karla said to herself, as if wanting to make the obvious impossible. ‘We were already below the gallery.’

‘Something stopped us.’ Eva glanced at the controls. The lights had gone out. She pressed the button for the intercom system. ‘Hello? Can anyone hear us?’

No answer.

‘What a mess,’ cursed Hsu.

‘I want to get out,’ pleaded Sushma. ‘Please, I want—’

‘Don’t start!’ Hsu barked at her. ‘You were the one that talked us into getting in this thing. It’s because of you that we’re stuck.’

‘You didn’t have to come too!’ Mukesh replied furiously. ‘Leave her be.’

‘Oh, shut it, Mukesh.’

‘Hey!’ Eva interrupted. ‘Don’t argue, we—’

Something made a crunching noise above them. A hollow, grinding noise joined it, followed by deathly silence.

The cabin jolted.

Then it fell.

‘You did what?’

Lynn stared at the monitor and Funaki’s baffled face.

‘They wanted to get in at all costs, Miss Orley,’ the Japanese man groaned. He gazed downwards. His head jerked forwards and backwards in quick succession, gestures of submission. ‘What was I supposed to do? I’m not an army general – people have their own free will.’

‘But it didn’t work! And we can’t make contact with them any more.’

‘Did they – get stuck?’

Lynn glanced at the controls. They had seen the cabin stop suddenly under the gallery, but after that the icon had disappeared.

No one said a word. Walo Ögi was pacing through the room, while Heidrun and Tim stared at the controls as if they could conjure up the icon again just by gazing at it.

There was a state of emergency in Lynn’s mind.

The drugs had unleashed their narcotic effect while the acute drama lashed away at her, pushing her beyond her limits. She felt confused, drunk almost, but at the same time acutely aware of every detail of her surroundings, a strange, unsettling clarity. There was no before and after, no more primary and secondary perception. Everything bombarded her at once, while less and less was making its way out. Different levels of reality layered on top of one another, broke apart, forced their way back together again, splintered, and created surreal backing scenery for the performance of incomprehensible plays. The blood rushed in her ears. For the hundredth, thousandth, zillionth time, she asked herself how on earth she could have let herself in for this, building space stations and moon hotels, instead of finally standing up to Julian and making it clear to him that she wasn’t perfect, wasn’t a superhuman, wasn’t even a healthy human for that matter. She should have told him that the task would destroy her, that you may well need a lunatic to create something brilliant and crazy, but certainly not to maintain it or even promote it. Because that, precisely that, was a task for the healthy ones, the mentally clear and stable, those who flirted with lunacy, flirted with it without a care in the world, not having the slightest idea what it really felt like.

How long would she be able to keep going?

Her head was ringing. She closed her eyes, pressing the tips of her fingers against her temples. She had to stay upright. She couldn’t allow the dam holding the flood of blackness to break. She was the only one that knew the hotel like the back of her hand. She had built it.

It was all down to her.

Filled with fear, she opened her eyes.

The symbol was back.

‘Help! Help! Can anyone hear us?’

Eva hammered furiously on the intercom button, shouting and shouting, while Sushma threw herself against the closed internal doors and tried to force them apart with her bare hands. Mukesh pulled her back by her shoulders and held her close to him.

‘I want to get out of here,’ she whimpered. ‘Please.’

The elevator had only dropped a metre, but the blood had rushed from all five faces and collected in their feet. As white as chalk, they looked at one another, like a group of ghosts suddenly realising they have already been dead for a long time.

‘Okay.’ Eva abandoned the intercom, raised her hand and tried to sound practical, which she was remarkably successful in doing. ‘The most important thing now is that we stay calm. That means you too, Sushma. Sushma? Okay?’

Sushma nodded, her lower lip trembling, her face wet with tears.

‘Good. We don’t know what’s wrong, and we can’t get through to anyone, so we have to find out.’

‘It can’t be all that bad,’ said Hsu. ‘I mean, there’s only a sixth of the—’

‘Twelve metres on the Moon are like two on Earth, you know that,’ retorted Karla. ‘And I guess we’re about a hundred and twenty metres up.’

‘Sshh! Listen.’

A rising and falling roaring sound filled their ears. A tormented howling mixed in with it, like a material under intense strain. Eva looked up to the ceiling. There was a bulkhead in clear view in the middle. She saw the operator control next to the display. She hesitated for a moment, then activated the mechanism. For a number of seconds, nothing happened, giving rise to the fear that this function had been damaged too. How were they supposed to get outside if the bulkhead had failed? But even while she was still pondering the alternatives, it stirred into motion and slowly rose. A flickering orange-red glow made its way in, the roaring intensified. She crouched down, pushing off from her knees, got a grip on the edge of the hatch, pulled herself up with a powerful swinging movement and clambered onto the roof.

‘My God,’ she whispered.

On the right-hand side, a large section of the dividing wall had been torn away, which meant she could see through to the neighbouring shaft. Five, perhaps six metres above her, was the smouldering, half-destroyed cabin of E2. The side casing was completely gone, exposing its inside, the source of the roaring sound, which was now even louder. Red apparitions darted across the floor of the burning elevator, streaks of rust were collecting further up in the shaft. There was debris wherever she looked. A bizarrely distorted, glowing and pulsing piece of metal was directly in front of her feet. She took a step back. At first she thought the brake shoes of the staff elevator had gripped and surrounded the guide rails, but on closer inspection two of them seemed to be blocked by splinters or possibly damaged. The heat was making thick beads of sweat build up over her forehead and upper lip.

Then, suddenly, the floor collapsed from under her feet.

A collective scream forced its way up to her as the cabin dropped another metre. Eva staggered, caught her balance, and saw that one of the brake shoes had opened up. No, worse than that, it had broken! In panic, she looked for a way out. Right in front of her eyes was the lower edge of the doors which led to the gallery. She wedged her finger between the gap, making a useless attempt to open them, but of course they didn’t move a single millimetre. Why would they? These weren’t normal elevator doors, but completely sealed-off bulkheads. As long as the system didn’t decide to open them, or unless someone activated them from the outside, she was only making a fool of herself and wasting valuable time.

‘Eva!’ She heard Sushma snivelling. ‘What’s happening?’

It was hard for her to ignore the poor woman, but she didn’t have time to tend to the others’ sensitivities as well. Feverishly, she searched for a solution. The still-intact wall, she now noticed, revealed a passage through to the E1 shaft, around a square metre in size. Several metres above, she spotted another passage, too high to reach, and the glowing and smoky fragments of the blasted-away cabin casing were splayed out in it. Feeling an unpleasant pressure on her chest, Eva turned to the other side to get a look at the E2 shaft. The entire upper section of the dividing wall had disappeared, replaced by a huge, gaping hole, the jagged edge of which was level with her forehead. She had to hoist herself up a bit to look over it. Vertical guide rails stretched down into the depths of the unknown. There were crossbars positioned at intervals in between, wide enough to be able to get a grip and a foothold on them, and on the other side of the shaft she saw—

A passageway.

A rectangular hole leading into a short, horizontal tunnel. It lay there buried in the wall, dark and mysterious, but Eva was pretty sure she knew where it led, and it was big enough for two people to crawl along it at once. With a little dexterity, they’d be able to get across to it.

The cabin creaked in its rails beneath her, metal scraping over metal. Mukesh Nair hoisted himself up through the hatch, raised his head and stared, aghast, at the glowing wreckage of E2.

‘Good God! What happened here—?’

‘Everyone out,’ said Eva. She pushed past him and called down to the others. ‘Out, quickly! And be careful, there’s burning debris everywhere.’

‘What’s the plan?’ asked Mukesh.

‘Help me.’

The elevator groaned and dropped a little more, while sparks rained down on her from above. In pain, Eva felt the dot-sized burns on her hands and upper arms. She had picked out a simple, sleeveless top for the evening, and now she was cursing herself for it. Hurrying, she helped Karla, Sushma and the alarmingly stiff Rebecca Hsu clamber out, until they were all standing on the roof.

‘Take your clothes off,’ said Eva, untucking her top from her trousers and pulling it over her head. ‘T-shirts, blouses, shirts, anything you can wrap around your hands.’

Sushma’s head jerked back and forth.

‘Why?’

‘Because we’ll burn our mitts if we don’t protect them.’ She gestured her head towards the gaping opening. ‘We need to get over there. Once you get to the other side, stay right up against the wall. There’s strutting between the elevator rails that you can grip onto to make your way along. Don’t look down, or up, just keep going. There’s a passageway on the other side, and I suspect it leads into the ventilator shaft.’

‘I’ll never make it,’ said Sushma in an anxious whisper.

‘Yes, you will,’ said Hsu decisively. ‘We’ll all make it, including you. And I’m sorry about before.’

Sushma smiled, her lips twitching. Without hesitation, Eva ripped the thin fabric of her top. It had been sinfully expensive, but that was irrelevant now. She wrapped the scraps around her hands and wrists and helped Karla deconstruct her own T-shirt while Mukesh assisted his wife. Hsu cursed as she stripped down to her underwear, despairing at the misappropriation of her cocktail dress. Mukesh handed her strips of his shirt.

‘Good’ said Eva. ‘I’ll go first.’

The cabin of the staff elevator shook. Eva clasped the edge of the destroyed dividing wall, pulled herself up and swung a leg onto the other side.

Not look down?

Eva, Eva. It was easier said than done. She suddenly felt queasy, and her courage disintegrated. The distant bottom of the shaft disappeared into the ominous darkness, and even the bars suddenly seemed disconcertingly narrow. Forcing herself not to look up at the demolished remains of cabin E2, she reached out, grabbed one of the bars and felt the heat penetrate the material wrapped around her hand. With her teeth clenched, she clambered right over to the other side and rested her feet on the hot steel.

Well, it wasn’t exactly a boulevard. But she was standing.

Resolved, she dared to take a step sideways and groped her way forwards until she reached the front-facing shaft wall. She bridged the corner with her leg and sent the tip of her foot searching for something to grip on to. Her upper body leaned backwards, the material of her improvised bandage slipped off against the steel of the brace. For a moment she feared losing her grip and clung on with her heart beating wildly. She couldn’t stop herself from craning her head back and staring at the underside of the glowing cabin. E2 was now directly above her, black and threatening, its edges fiery.

If the thing falls now, she thought to herself, at least I won’t have to worry about whether they still have the blouse at Louis Vuitton. Then she remembered that Rebecca Hsu had bought Louis Vuitton, years ago even.

Rebecca will just have to sort something out for me then, she thought grimly.

She tightened her grip. With one more courageous step, she reached the bars on the front wall. Quickly now! The heat was starting to get painful through the bandages, burn blisters were inevitable. They wouldn’t be able to last all that long in here, and to top it all off she had a sneaking suspicion that the smoke was making its way downwards now too. Arching her feet like a ballerina, she pushed her way past the lower edge of the elevator doors, then conquered the second corner as well. The opening was to her right, barely a metre away. Cautiously, she turned her head and saw Karla at the height of the doors, closely followed by Sushma, who had her face turned towards the wall and was obediently refusing to look up or down. Mukesh, who had just made it to the other side, secured himself with his right hand and helped Hsu heave her ample body across the ledge.

‘Take care of Sushma,’ said Hsu, ignoring Mukesh’s outstretched hand. ‘I can make it by myse—’

Her words were drowned out by metallic screeching. She hurriedly swung herself over the ledge. A crash and clatter sounded out, disappearing quickly into the depths as the staff elevator fell.

‘Everything okay?’ Mukesh’s voice echoed off the walls and was swallowed by the abyss.

Hsu nodded, trembling on one of the bars. ‘God that’s hot!’

‘Wait, I’m coming.’

‘No, I’m fine. Go. Go!’

Eva took a deep breath and pushed herself forward to just below the passageway. It was higher up than she had thought and she could only just peer over the ledge, but there were two narrow rungs built into the wall. With a chin-up, she managed to get inside. She crawled forwards and, almost immediately, her hands came up against a metal plate which sealed off the back of the passageway. To the side of it was a small control panel. Taking a chance, she pressed her finger on it, and at the same moment icy horror rushed through her.

Vacuum pressure! What if the fire and smoke had already annihilated too much of the oxygen in the elevator shaft?

To her incredible relief, the panel glided to the side and revealed an evenly lit, two-metre-square shaft. There was a ladder on the left-hand side. She contorted herself to turn around, crept back and stretched both hands out towards Karla.

‘In here,’ she called, her voice reverberating. ‘The ventilation shaft is behind here.’

Karla slithered into the passage next to her.

‘Climb down the ladder,’ said Eva. ‘At some point there should be a way of getting out.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m helping the others.’

‘Okay.’

Sushma turned her face towards her. In it, hope and deathly fear were grappling for supremacy.

‘Everything’s okay, Sushma.’ Eva smiled. ‘Everything’s fine now.’

There was a loud creak above her, then a metallic crash, and sparks rained down in dense showers.

Eva looked up. A fiery glow was gleaming through a crack in the cabin. Had that been there before? It looked as though the floor of the burning cabin was beginning to break away from the rest of it.

No, she thought. Not yet. Please!

Hsu looked towards the ceiling in alarm as she battled to overcome the second corner. Her knees were shaking violently.

Sushma started to cry. Hastily, Eva pulled the Indian woman into the shaft, helped by Mukesh, who pushed from below and then hesitated, unsure as to whether he should follow his wife or help Hsu, who was edging her way along centimetre by centimetre.

‘Get in!’ ordered Eva. ‘I’ll take care of Rebecca. Come on!’

Mukesh obeyed, squeezed past her and disappeared into the ventilation shaft. Another creak came from above. The glowing rain became denser. Hsu screamed as sparks landed on her naked shoulders. She pressed herself against the wall, unable to carry on, frozen with fear.

‘Rebecca!’ Eva stretched her upper body out.

‘I can’t,’ groaned Hsu.

‘You’re almost there.’ She stretched her long arms out to the Chinese woman, trying to get a hold on her.

‘My legs aren’t doing what I tell them.’

‘Just a little further! Hold on to me.’

Volley-like blows droned through the shaft. The cabin floor of E2 bulged out, then exploded into pieces.

No, pleaded Eva. Not now. Not yet. Please not yet!

She reached out as far as she could. Fiery reflections darted over the walls of the shaft. The Chinese woman overcame both her rigidity and the corner, managed to take an utterly fearless step, came closer, made her way to right beneath her, grasped her outstretched right hand, lifted her gaze to Eva—

And then up to the ceiling.

Time stood still.

With a crash, the floor plate broke free. Hsu’s features contorted, reflecting the realisation that she had lost, and froze. For the duration of a heartbeat, her gaze rested on Eva.

‘No!’ screamed Eva. ‘No!’

The Chinese woman pulled her hands away. As if wanting to welcome her end with open arms, she spread them out, let herself fall and tipped backwards into the shaft. Eva reacted instinctively. In a flash, she pulled back, protected her head and buried her face in her elbows. Centimetres away from her, the cabin floor thundered past, spitting out fountains of embers. It singed her lower arms, hands and hair, but she didn’t feel a thing. The elevator shaft filled with the sounds of crashing and banging. In distraught disbelief, she pulled herself over the edge and watched as the fiery cloud became smaller and paler, until it seemed to implode into the depths as the cabin floor fell deeper and deeper.

Rebecca’s coffin lid.

‘No,’ she whispered.

Tongues of fire lashed down from above. Eva pulled herself back into the ventilation shaft. Her feet found the ladder of their own accord. There was an identical control panel to the one in the passageway. On autopilot now, she touched it and the trapdoor glided shut without a sound. Below her, she heard voices, the echo of feet on metallic ladder rungs. She had lost all concept of an imaginable future. Listlessly, she hung there in the heat of the shaft. The heat was unbearable here too, but she was shaking all over, freezing, as if her heart were pumping icy water, and couldn’t get a grip of her thoughts, not even when the tears began to stream down her bony cheeks.

‘Eva?’ It was Karla, from deep below her. ‘Eva, are you there?’

Silently, she made her way down. To wherever that might be.

‘Hey!’ Heidrun pointed at the wall monitor showing the plan of the elevators. Through a channel to the left of E2, glowing dots were moving, disappearing for a short while, then appearing again, constantly changing their position. ‘What’s that?’

‘The ventilation shaft!’ Lynn pushed her sweat-soaked hair off her forehead. ‘They’re in the ventilation shaft.’

By now, the staff elevator had disappeared from the screen. The computer reported it as having fallen, but had no information about E2 at all.

‘Can they get out of there by themselves?’ asked Ögi.

‘It depends. If the fire has spread to the elevator shaft, then the loss of pressure could mean the exits are blocked.’

‘If there were a fire in the ventilation shaft they would be dead by now.’

‘The E2 shaft is on fire too, but they still made it through and across to the other side.’ Lynn massaged her temples. ‘Someone has to go to the lobby, quickly!’

‘I’ll go,’ said Heidrun.

‘Good. To the left of E2 there’s a wall casing made of bamboo—’

‘I know it.’

‘The trough is on rails; just push it to the side. Behind it, you’ll see a bulkhead with a control panel.’

Heidrun nodded and set off.

‘It leads into a short passageway,’ Lynn called after her. ‘Very short, not even two metres long, then there’s another bulkhead. From there—’

‘—it leads into the ventilation shaft. I’ve got it.’

In long, bouncing strides, she hurried through the lobby, under the circulating model of the solar system and through to the elevators, of which only one was still usable at most. She turned her attention to the bamboo trough, rolled it aside, then hesitated. Mid-motion, she suddenly felt paralysed. Millimetres above the sensor, the tips of her fingers froze, while a chill crept down her spine at the thought of what might lie behind the bulkhead. Would flames lash out at her? Was this her last conscious moment, would it be her last memory of a life of physical freedom, free from injury?

The fear subsided. Resolute now, she tapped the field. The bulkhead swung open and cool air came out. She walked into the passageway, opened the second bulkhead, put her head through and looked up. It was a surreal sight. Walls, ladders and emergency lights stretched out towards a murky vanishing point. High above her, she caught sight of people on the rungs.

‘Down here!’ she cried. ‘Here!’

Miranda Winter had lost her composure.

‘Rebecca?’ she sobbed.

Feeling distanced from the situation for a moment, O’Keefe reflected that she was one of the few people who still looked attractive while they were in tears. Many with well-formed physiognomy took on frog-like features in a state of tormented suffering, while others looked as if they actually wanted to laugh and weren’t really sure how. Eyebrows slid up to the hairline, usually pretty noses swelled up to become oozing boils. He had seen every conceivable deformation in his time, but Miranda’s despair harboured erotic charm, accentuated by her streaky, running black make-up.

Why was something like that going through his mind? He was tired of his thoughts. They were all just diversionary tactics to prevent him from feeling. And for what? Because grief created intimacy with others who were grieving, and because he took care to keep his distance from all kinds of intimacy? Was it really so much better to stumble out of Madigan’s Pub on Talbot Street, utterly alone and completely pissed, all just to keep his distance?

‘So we’ll use the ventilation shafts,’ resumed Funaki, struggling to stay composed.

‘Not the western shaft,’ said Lynn’s image on the monitor. ‘It’s too close to E2, and besides, the sensors there are reporting increasing smoke development. Try the other side – everything seems to be okay there.’

‘And what—’ Funaki swallowed. ‘What about the others? Are they at least—’

Lynn fell silent. She looked away. O’Keefe noticed how awful she looked, just a Lynn-like shell with something staring out from it. Something he had no desire to get to know.

‘They’re fine,’ she said tonelessly.

Funaki nodded in self-reproach. ‘Then we’ll open up the eastern shaft now.’

‘See you in the lobby, Michio. You know the way out.’

As it happened, there was nothing left that could be burned.

The second oxygen tank had been drained to the last dregs, and all that remained of the three corpses was caked ashes. Whatever could have gone up in flames was already consumed, but it still continued to flicker and glow. After the partial fall of E2, the smoke in the shaft of the staff elevator had risen and become trapped, prevented from circulating by the shutdown of the ventilators, which would have distributed it everywhere. The temperature difference had created its own circulation system, however, and more and more clouds of smoke were emerging from the deformed materials. This meant that the elevator shaft which Eva and the others had crossed through barely fifteen minutes before now didn’t even offer a breath of air or a centimetre of vision. At the height of the cabin’s smouldering remains, the sealed trapdoors had melted to the west ventilation shaft, and this too was now full of smoke, although the shields of the east shaft were holding out for the time being. In the neck of Gaia, the temperature still resembled that of a solar furnace, dramatically increasing the viscosity of the steel beam which was supporting the head of the figure. Once again, Gaia’s chin tilted a little, and this time—

—it was noticeable.

‘The floor just moved,’ whispered Olympiada Rogacheva, grabbing on to Miranda, whose flood of tears ran dry at that very moment.

‘I’m sure it’s built to be elastic,’ she sniffed, patting Olympiada’s hand. ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. Skyscrapers on Earth shake too, you know, when there’s an earthquake.’

‘You may well be built elastically.’ O’Keefe stared outside, his mouth dry. ‘But Gaia certainly isn’t.’

‘How would you know? Hey, Michio, what—’

‘There’s no time!’ Funaki stood on the landing, waving wildly with both arms. ‘Come on. Quickly!’

‘Maybe we’re just suffering from mass hysteria,’ said Miranda to the distraught Olympiada as she followed Funaki into the Luna Bar and from there down into Selene. Again, the floor gave way beneath them.

‘Chikusho!’ hissed Funaki.

O’Keefe’s knowledge of Japanese was practically nonexistent, but after several days in the company of Momoka Omura he had become sufficiently familiar with swearwords.

‘That bad?’ he asked.

‘Very. We can’t afford to lose a single second.’ Funaki opened a cabinet, took out four oxygen masks and hurried to one of the two free-standing columns, which O’Keefe had until now assumed to be decorative, clad with holographs of constellations. Now, as the Japanese man pushed one of their surfaces to the side, a man-size bulkhead came into view behind it.

‘The ventilation shaft!’

‘Yes.’ Funaki nodded. ‘It starts up here. Let’s all cross our fingers. The control centre said it’s smoke-free inside, no loss of pressure.’ He handed out the masks. ‘But regardless. Let’s put them on until we know for sure. Just slip them on so they’re snug and the eyes are protected behind the visor. No, the other way around, Miss Olympiada, the other way around!’ His hands flapped. ‘Miss Miranda, could you help her? Thank you. Mr O’Keefe, may I see? Yes, just like that. Very good.’

In no time at all, he had pulled his own mask on, checked it and carried on talking, his voice muffled now. ‘As soon as the bulkhead is open, I’ll go in. Wait until I give you the signal, then follow me one after the other, first Miss Olympiada, then Miss Miranda, then Mr O’Keefe bringing up the rear. The ladder leads directly into the lobby. Stay close to me. Any questions?’

The women shook their heads.

‘No,’ said Finn.

Funaki tapped the sensor, stepped back and waited. The bulkhead swung open and warm air came out. O’Keefe stepped next to the Japanese man and looked down. They peered into a dimly lit shaft which dropped down into the depths.

‘Visibility seems clear.’

Funaki nodded. ‘Wait until I give the green light.’

He climbed in, put both feet on the rungs, put his hands on the side struts and began to clamber down. His chest, shoulders and head disappeared beneath the ledge. O’Keefe peered in after him. Funaki looked around and gazed appraisingly down below. After about five metres, he stopped his descent and tipped his face up towards them.

‘Everything’s okay so far. Come on.’

‘Olympiada, darling!’ Miranda took the Russian woman in her arms, held her close and kissed her on the forehead. ‘We’re almost there, my sweet.’ She sank her voice to a whisper: ‘And after that you leave him. Do you hear me? You have to. Leave him. No woman has to put up with that.’

The molecular bonds were starting to break.

It would have taken higher temperatures to melt the steel like butter, but the heat was still enough to transform some of the braces into a kind of glutinous rubber, which slowly deformed under the pressure of the tonnes of weight they bore. Gaia’s head visibly compacted the weakened materials together and, in the process, created tensions which the stressed glass façade and mooncrete plates weren’t able to withstand. The water between the panes of the double glazing, evaporating, forced the structures apart – and, suddenly, one of the concrete modules simply broke right across, the full width of it.

Gaia’s lower jaw dropped heavily onto the glass façade.

One after another, the inner and outer panes shattered. Splinters and water vapour swirled into the vacuum; rendered unstable, structural elements, tattered components of the life-support systems and ashes were carried away in a chain reaction. The artificial atmosphere spread out around Gaia’s neck like a cloud and evaporated in the heat of the sun’s rays. But the major part was in the shade, with the result that the air crystallised as the coldness of outer space forced its way inside, extinguishing all flames in a second and cooling down the glowing steel so quickly that it wasn’t able to solidify slowly, but instead froze in brittle fragility.

The support beams held out for a few more seconds.

Then they gave way.

This time, Gaia’s head sank forward much more, held only by the main cord of the massive steel spine, which so far had not been so badly affected. The last remains of the neck front splintered, the chin tilted further, the layers of insulation above the shoulders cracked, the concrete modules ruptured and a gaping hole opened up in the ventilation shaft.

O’Keefe stumbled backwards over a table. Olympiada, who was just about to clamber into the shaft, was hurled against Miranda, knocking her down to the floor.

We’re falling, he thought. The head is falling!

Filled with horror, he pulled himself up, trying to get a grip on something. His right hand grasped hold of the edge of the airlock.

‘Into the shaft,’ he cried out. ‘Quickly!’

He looked inside.

Into the shaft?

Maybe not! Funaki was staring up at him with his eyes wide, trying to climb back up again, but something was stopping him, pulling at him with all its might. He screamed something and stretched out his arm. O’Keefe leaned over to grasp his outstretched hand, when he suddenly had the eerie sensation that he was looking into the gullet of a living thing. His hair, his clothes, everything began to flap wildly. A powerful suction seized him, and in a flash he realised what was happening.

The air was being sucked out of Gaia’s head. There must be a leak somewhere in the shaft.

The vacuum was threatening to swallow them up.

He braced himself against the frame, trying to reach Funaki’s hand. The Japanese man tried with all his might to reach the next rung of the ladder. Out of the corner of his eye, O’Keefe saw the bulkhead starting to move, making its way up, the goddamn automatic mechanism, but it was just doing its job; the shaft had to close so they wouldn’t all be sucked into it, but Funaki, he couldn’t leave Funaki! Hands clung to his clothing; Miranda and Olympiada were screaming, preventing him from being sucked in. The bulkhead came closer. He stretched out his arm as far as he could, felt his fingertips touch the other man’s for a second – then Funaki was torn from the rungs and disappeared into the abyss with a shrill scream.

The women pulled Finn away. The bulkhead slammed shut in front of his eyes. Breathless, they helped one another up, struggling to balance on the uneven floor of the restaurant. Eerie creaks and groans forced their way up to them from Gaia’s depths, harbingers of even worse disaster.

Dana heard the same noises directly above her. A powerful blow had ripped her off her feet, followed by an immense roar, which had died away as abruptly as it came. But the gallery still seemed to be echoing from the explosion-like crash which had come before the roar. The entire building had swung like a tuning fork, then finally settled, and all at once there was deathly silence. Apart from the wails and squeaks in the roof, which sounded like cats roaming through the night in search of mates.

She ran to the bulkhead and hit her hands against the mechanism. It stayed shut.

‘Lynn,’ she screamed.

‘No answer.

‘Lynn! What’s going on? Lynn!’

No one in the control centre responded.

‘Come on, talk to me! Something huge has broken up there. I don’t want to die in here.’

She looked around. By now, visibility in the gallery was pretty much clear again; the ventilators had done a good job. The pressure would soon be restored, but if what had happened up there was what she feared, then this area was in danger of being buried under the weight of the head sooner or later too.

She had to get out of here! She had to take control again.

‘Lynn!’

‘Dana.’ Lynn sounded like a robot. ‘There have been a number of incidents. Wait your turn.’

Dana sank down with her back to the wall, exhausted. That damn bitch! She couldn’t blame her of course, she had every reason to be angry, but pure hatred for Julian’s daughter was burning up within Dana. In a way that was completely contrary to her nature, she began to take it personally. Lynn had brought this disaster on her. Just you wait, she thought.

Cape Heraclides, Montes Jura

At about eleven o’clock, Momoka suddenly stopped.

‘If he fell anywhere, then it would have been here,’ she said.

Julian, who was driving ahead of her, stopped too. They parked behind one another on the sunlit expanse of the Mare Imbrium. To their left, Cape Heraclides and the southern foothills of the Montes Jura towered out from the basalt sea, the steep outposts of the Sinus Iridum, the Rainbow Bay. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that, instead of sitting in rovers, they were in expedition boats, looking at the land across the calm sea; the only thing missing was perhaps a little colour and a picturesque lighthouse on the rocky cliffs. As if to complete the illusion, satellite images were displaying the widely dispersed, flat waves in which the frozen flood of the mare fell into the Rainbow Bay. They were, however, old images, as the weather conditions over Sinus Iridum had changed since the beginning of helium-3 mining. A broad bank of fog had now swallowed the waves and seemed to be drawing in landwards. From where they had stopped, they could just make out the clouds in the distance, a shapeless grey weighing down on the stony sea.

‘Could he have flown another route?’ asked Evelyn.

‘It’s possible.’ Julian looked up at the sky, as if Locatelli had left some sign behind for them in it.

‘Probable even,’ said Rogachev. ‘He had problems regaining control of the shuttle. If he succeeded, he could have drifted off course a fair bit.’

‘Where exactly is the mining station again?’ asked Amber.

‘In the mining zone.’ Julian pointed his outstretched arm towards the dust barrier. ‘Just a hundred kilometres from here on the axis between Cape Heraclides and Cape Laplace in the north.’

‘By the way, how’s our oxygen looking?’

‘Good, considering the circumstances. The problem is that we can’t rely on the maps any more.’

Amber lowered her map. Until now, she had had the advantage of clear visibility. Every crater, every hill marked on the lunar maps had reliably appeared on the horizon at some point, clarifying their position precisely, but in the sea of dust their sense of orientation would be incredibly reduced.

‘So we should try our best not to get lost,’ Evelyn put in with matter-of-fact firmness.

‘And Warren?’ asked Momoka insistently. ‘What about Warren?’

‘Well…’ Julian hesitated. ‘If only we knew that.’

‘What a helpful response, thank you!’ She snorted. ‘Why don’t we look for him?’

‘We can’t risk that, Momoka.’

‘Why not? We have to go to the foot of the Cape anyway.’

‘And from there directly on to the station.’

‘We don’t even know if he really fell,’ Evelyn reflected. ‘Maybe—’

‘Of course he did!’ exploded Momoka. ‘Don’t kid yourself! Do you really want to drive happily on while he’s stuck in a wreck together with that arsehole Carl?’

‘There’s no question of us doing it happily,’ protested Evelyn. ‘But the zone is huge. He could be anywhere.’

‘But—’

‘We’re not looking for him,’ said Julian decisively. ‘I can’t be responsible for that.’

‘You really are unbelievable!’

‘No, but it would be unbelievable to not get to the mining station because of you,’ said Evelyn, her tone audibly cooler. ‘It’s not that we don’t care about Warren, but we can’t search the entire Mare Imbrium until we run out of oxygen.’

‘I have a suggestion.’ Oleg cleared his throat. ‘In a way, Momoka is right. We have to go over to the Cape anyway, so why don’t we just drive along a little and keep our eyes open? Not an organised search, just three, four kilometres and then on towards the mining station.’

‘Sounds sensible,’ said Evelyn.

Julian pondered the suggestion for a moment. So far they hadn’t needed to touch the oxygen reserves.

‘Okay, I think we can do that,’ he said reluctantly.

They veered off, headed for the landmass and steered into the bay a little, the ascending mountain range to their left. A few minutes later, they reached a shallow ditch which stretched out diagonally across the ground, seeming to emerge right out of the fog.

Julian slowed down the rover.

‘That’s not a ditch,’ said Oleg.

They were staring at a broadly carved-out path. It had been torn into the regolith like a wound, its edges forced up.

‘It’s fresh,’ said Amber.

Momoka stood up from her seat and stared into the distant cloud, then turned to the other side.

‘There,’ she whispered.

Something was lying at an angle on the slope where the strand of the Cape swung up to the mountain range. It was reflecting the sunlight: a small, elongated and alarmingly familiar shape.

It also marked the end of the path.

Without saying a word, Julian accelerated. He drove at top speed, and yet Momoka still managed to overtake him. The terrain was only gently inclined, bearable for the rovers, which thanks to the flexible wheel suspension were able to work their way swiftly up the path. By now there was no longer any doubt that they were looking at the wreck of the Ganymede. Its legs gone, it rested in the middle of the rockfall on the slope, wedged tightly between larger chunks of rock. Its rear hatch was wide open. Not far from the ramp lay a body, its head and shoulders in the shadow of the rock. While Julian was still figuring out how he could hold Momoka back, she had already jumped down from the driver’s seat and was rushing up the hill. He heard her wheezing on the speakers in his helmet, saw her fall to her knees. Her upper body was swallowed by the shadow, then a short, ghostly cry resounded.

‘Evelyn,’ said Julian on a separate frequency. ‘I think you would be the best one to…’

‘Okay,’ said Evelyn unhappily. ‘I’ll look after her.’

Sinus Iridum

Considering all the setbacks he had faced so far, Hanna had been amazed to make it to the mining station without problem. He was all too familiar with the nature of escalation. The damaged axle of the buggy was bound to break apart prematurely, and that’s exactly what it did, the dramaturgy of failure obliging fifteen kilometres too soon. It wasn’t a pothole or geological fault that finished it off, however. It broke in two with banal finality on even ground, bringing the vehicle to an abrupt halt, forcing it into a spin, and that was that.

Hanna sprang down into the debris. The basic rule of survival was to think positive. The fact that the old banger had even made it that far, for example. And the fact that he had an extraordinary sense of orientation, which had enabled him to find his way without fail so far. Regardless of the miserable visibility, he had held his course, of that he was certain. As long as he just kept going in a straight line, he should reach the mining station within about an hour. But he would have to really watch out from now on. The dust concealed dangers that weren’t so easy to get away from on foot as in the buggy. He would have to keep his distance. Admittedly the beetles were quite slow, but the filigree, nimble spiders had a tendency to make unpleasant surprise appearances.

Hanna let his gaze wander. Some distance away, he saw a ghostly silhouette hurrying along towards him. He walked over to the buggy’s cargo bed, grabbed a survival pack in each hand and marched off.

Cape Heraclides, Montes Jura

While Evelyn attended to her emotional support duties, Julian, Amber and Oleg feverishly searched the inside of the wreck and the nearby area, but there was nothing to suggest that Hanna was still around.

‘How did he get away?’ Amber wondered.

‘The Ganymede had a buggy on board,’ said Julian, as he trudged around the nose of the shuttle. ‘And it’s disappeared.’

‘Yes, and I know where,’ Oleg’s voice rang out from the opposite end of the ship. ‘Maybe you should come over here.’

Seconds later, they were all standing in the path. So far they had only noticed the devastation the shuttle had inflicted on the regolith when making its emergency landing, the brutality with which it had dug into the surface, but something different now captured their attention: a story about someone who had set off into the far-away dust, a story told by—

‘Tyre tracks,’ said Julian.

‘Your buggy,’ confirmed Oleg. ‘Hanna has driven down along the path and out onto the plain. I don’t know how well he knows the area, but what else could he be interested in other than the place we also want to get to?’

‘So the bastard just fucked off!’ Momoka came over with Evelyn, down from the hill where Warren Locatelli lay.

‘Momoka,’ began Julian, ‘I’m so terribly—’

‘There’s no need. No outpourings of sympathy, please. The only thing I’m interested in is killing him.’

‘We’ll give Warren a proper burial.’

‘There’s no time for that.’ Her voice had lost all modulation. Autopilot driven by rage. ‘I looked at Warren’s face, Julian. And do you know what? He spoke to me. Not some jabbering from the other side, not that old shit. He would speak to you too, if you took the effort to go over there to him. You just have to look him in the face. He doesn’t look the same as he did before, but you can hear him say loudly and clearly that humans have no business being up here. None at all! Not us, and not you either,’ she added in a hostile tone.

‘Momoka, I—’

‘He said we should never have accepted your invitation!’

But you did, thought Julian, though he didn’t say a word.

‘Carl has driven to the mining zone,’ said Amber.

‘Very well.’ Momoka marched over to the rovers. ‘We have to go there anyway, right?’

‘No, wait,’ said Julian.

‘For what?’ She stopped. ‘You seemed to be in a hurry just now.’

‘I’ve found some additional oxygen reserves in the storage space of the shuttle. Really, Momoka, we have time to give him a decent—’

‘That’s very sensitive of you, but Warren is already buried. Carl slit open his stomach and took off his helmet. I don’t see any reason to stone him too.’

There was icy silence for a second.

‘So?’ she asked. ‘Shall we go?’

‘I’ll drive,’ said Evelyn.

‘I’m happy to as well—’ Oleg offered.

‘None of you will drive,’ decided Momoka. ‘If any of us has reason to drive, then it’s me. To follow him.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Amber cautiously.

‘I’ve never been so sure,’ said Momoka, and her voice made her visor steam up.

‘Fine.’ Julian looked out over the plain. ‘Seeing as we don’t have any satellite connection, I’ll link the four of us on one frequency. From now on, no one will be able to hear us, not even Carl, should we get close to him. It might help.’

Gaia, Vallis Alpina

‘There must be a way!’

Tim had lost all sense of time. Seconds seemed to drag out endlessly, but at the same time an hour dwindled into a disheartening nothing, brief enough to feel useless. Although the deaths had had the relative advantage of distracting them from the bomb, it took on a new, tyrannical presence now that they had alerted the prisoners to the threatening cataclysm. Strangely, Lynn seemed to gain more strength the more confused the situation became. It wasn’t that she was really doing any better, but catastrophes, real catastrophes, seemed to have an exorcising effect on the demons in her head – even her perception of Tim was gradually becoming closer to his true nature. They were nothing other than the monsters of hypothesis, creatures from the family of what-ifs, the genus of could-bes, all equipped with the torture devices of paths left untaken.

He felt deeply sorry for his sister.

The fear that her work could turn out to be vulnerable and faulty must have cost her every last rational thought. Tim was now convinced that his uneasiness, fed by Dana Lawrence’s suspicions, had proved to be a tragic misunderstanding. Lynn wasn’t the one trying to cause damage to her own creation and its occupants. Her mind might be struggling against disintegration, but for the moment there was probably nothing better than for her to be forced to react by her nightmares being realised. After all, she was even explaining the latest developments to Dana, her newly elected arch enemy, and taking a huge, humbling leap by asking the fired director for her advice.

‘We’ve looked at the images from the external camera,’ she said. ‘The flames have clearly led to a partial breakdown in the steel skeleton within Gaia’s neck. So the fire should have been extinguished, but now the structure is damaged. There are a number of gaping leaks up there.’

Dana was silent. She seemed to be thinking.

‘Come on, Dana,’ pressed Lynn. ‘I need your assessment of the situation.’

‘Well, what’s yours?’

‘That there’s only one way out for Miranda, Olympiada and Finn, and it’s not downwards.’

‘Over the viewing terrace, you mean?’

‘Yes. Out through the airlock in the Mama Quilla Club.’

‘We’d have to overcome two problems with that,’ said Dana. ‘First, you can’t climb up over the outside of the head.’

‘Yes, you can. We planned for a roll-out ladder in case of emergency.’

‘But it wasn’t installed.’

‘Why not? According to the safety regulations—’

‘For optical reasons. On your instructions, by the way,’ added Dana, with audible satisfaction. ‘We could carry out the installation of course, but it would be dreadfully complicated under the prevailing conditions and it would also take a considerable amount of time.’

‘The second problem is harder to solve,’ interjected O’Keefe, who was switched on to their frequency. So the fibre-optic connection still seemed to be intact at least. ‘We don’t have any spacesuits up here. So the terrace won’t be much help to us.’

‘Couldn’t we bring some up?’ asked Ögi. He was relentlessly pacing the room, taking equally long, precisely measured steps, or so it seemed to Tim. He was the only one who had stayed behind in the control centre. The others were seated in the lobby, trying to get a grip on things with Heidrun’s help. ‘E1 still seems to be functioning.’

‘But E1 only goes to the neck,’ said Tim.

‘Forget it.’ Lynn shook her head. ‘The shaft is completely sealed off to protect us from the vacuum. After the structural changes up there the doors wouldn’t open up again anyway. There’s only one option.’

‘Through the airlock,’ said Dana.

‘Yes.’ Lynn dug her teeth into her lower lip. ‘From the outside. We have to get the suits inside through the airlock of the viewing platform.’

‘But for that you’ll have to bring them up first,’ said Finn. ‘And it won’t stop creaking up here so it has to be quick! I don’t know how much longer the head will hold.’

‘Callisto,’ said Dana. ‘Bring them up on the Callisto.’

‘Where is Nina anyway?’ asked Tim.

Lynn looked at him in surprise. In the heat of the moment she had completely forgotten the Danish pilot.

‘Wasn’t she with you in the bar?’ asked Lynn.

‘Who – Nina?’ O’Keefe shook his head. ‘No.’

‘And has someone down here—’ Lynn paused. ‘Oh, shit! In order to bring up the Callisto, we need someone who can carry out precision manoeuvres in a large craft.’ The last trace of colour drained from her face. ‘We have to find Nina!’

‘We can’t wait that long,’ urged Finn.

‘Then—’ She tried to catch her breath in an effort to fight off a panic attack. ‘We could – we have ten grasshoppers in the garage! Almost all of you have already flown a craft like that.’

‘Sure, close to the ground,’ said Dana. ‘But do you think you could manage this? Climb up more than a hundred and fifty metres with a grasshopper and carry out a precision landing on the terrace?’

‘The precision landing isn’t a problem,’ said Tim. ‘But the height—’

‘Technically speaking the height is the least of our worries; theoretically they can be used to fly in open space.’ Lynn brushed her hands over her eyes. ‘But Dana’s right. I don’t trust myself. Not in my condition. I’d lose my nerve.’

It was the first time she had publicly dropped her guard. Tim had never known her to do that. He took it as a good sign.

‘Okay, fine,’ he said. ‘How many of the things do we need? Each hopper can take one additional person, so three all together, right? Three pilots. I’ll do it. Walo?’

‘I’ve never been up that high with one, but if Lynn thinks it will work—’

Tim ran into the lobby and clapped his hands.

‘Someone!’ he called. ‘We need one person for the third hopper.’

‘Me’ said Heidrun, without knowing what it was even about.

‘Are you sure? You have to land the thing on Gaia’s head. Do you think you can do it?’

‘Generally speaking, I think I’m capable of doing anything…’

‘No fear of heights?’

‘… but whether I manage it or not is a different matter.’

‘No, it’s not.’ Tim shook his head. ‘You have to manage it. You have to know now whether you can or not, otherwise—’

She stood up and brushed her white hair behind her ears.

‘No, no “otherwise”. I’ll manage it.’

There were spares of all the spacesuits concealed behind a wall in the lobby, which meant they didn’t have to go up over the bridges to the lockers. They helped each other into the suits, put the gear for Olympiada Rogacheva, Miranda and Finn together and packed it into boxes.

‘Are there problems in the corridor?’ asked Tim.

‘No, the sensors are registering steady values.’ Lynn went ahead of them, led them to a passageway the other side of the elevators and opened a large bulkhead. Behind it was a spacious stairway with steep steps.

‘You’ll get down below this way. I’ll open the garage from the control centre.’

Tim reflected that she should perhaps have built a route like this upstairs too, but bit back the observation.

‘Good luck,’ said Lynn.

Tim hesitated. Then he put both arms around his sister and pulled her close. ‘I know what you’re going through,’ he said softly, ‘and I’m unbelievably proud of you. I have no idea how you’re coping with all this.’

‘Nor do I,’ she whispered.

‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ he said.

‘What’s left?’ She pulled away from his embrace and grasped his hands. ‘Tim, you have to believe me, I have nothing to do with Carl, no matter what Dana says. It’s myself I’m destroying, not anything else.’

‘This isn’t your fault, Lynn. There’s nothing you can do!’

‘Now go.’ The corner of her mouth twitched. ‘Quickly!’

There was something inherently calming about the empty, coolly lit corridor, designed to reinstate and strengthen trust in technological advancement. Its rationality made it seem immune to corruption from recklessly caused catastrophes, but Tim reminded himself that, in a way, it had all started here, with the appearance of Carl Hanna rousing Julian’s mistrust. He wondered whether the bomb was hidden below them. A few hours hadn’t been enough to search every nook and cranny. How small was a mini-nuke? Was it under the conveyor belt that stretched out alongside them? Under one of the floor tiles? Behind the wall, in the ceiling?

They had suggested that Sushma, Mukesh, Eva and Karla take the Lunar Express to the foot of the Montes Alpes and wait there at a safe distance until they had either freed the prisoners or been blown to smithereens with the hotel. But they had all insisted on staying, even Sushma, who had bravely tried to suppress her fear. In order to give their battered morale a boost, Lynn had ended up sending the women to look for Nina Hedegaard, since this would at least keep them occupied. Tim hoped fervently that his sister wouldn’t crack up back at the control centre, but was reassured to a certain extent by the fact that Mukesh had stayed with her. They reached the garage and saw the rafters of the retractable roof disappear into their cases. The starry sky was twinkling above them. A dozen buggies stood there waiting for a party that would never take place.

The shapeless Callisto rested opposite them with clumsy assertiveness, as if suggesting it was capable of flying to Mars. Ugly but reliable, as poor Chuck had joked just the day before. Compared with the shuttle, the laughable grasshoppers looked like toys.

‘Who’s flying in front?’ asked Heidrun.

‘Tim,’ said Ögi decisively as he stowed the box containing Olympiada’s suit into the small cargo hold. ‘Then you, then me, to make sure I don’t lose you.’

‘Lynn,’ said Tim over his helmet radio, ‘we’re setting off.’

He still couldn’t get used to the lack of engine noise. The hopper rose without a sound, exited the garage and started its ascent. From behind, Gaia looked just the same as it always had: superior and indestructible. The camera in his helmet sent images back to the control centre. He flew in an arc, as agreed with Lynn beforehand, so she could get an idea of how the front section looked. He intensified the thrust, let the force carry him towards the shoulder of the huge figure, then held his breath.

‘Good God.’ Walo’s voice piped up in his helmet.

It had been obvious even from the side view that something wasn’t right. Parts of the façade were missing or lay in ruins, and in places the naked steel of the support framework was exposed. Now, as they flew directly towards it, the full extent of the destruction was revealed. The contourless face was no longer focused on the Earth, but just beneath it. Where the neck had once been, there was now a gaping, black, collapsed hole. The complete front section was broken away, and Gaia’s chin was sunk so far that only the lower half of the elevator doors was still peeping out.

Tim steered the hopper closer. The colossal skull seemed to be hanging by a thread at the neck. E2 stood open, its insides just a gullet corroded by flames. Steel columns, grotesquely deformed, faced towards him. His stomach filled with dread as he dared to look down one more time. There was debris distributed all over the figure’s upper thigh, albeit not much. And it looked as if Gaia were nodding to him. Finn was right: they had come not a moment too soon.

On the ascent, he saw the sealed-off Chang’e, and was convinced he could make out smoke and rust inside it, burnt furnishings, but the dark windows with their gold filtering concealed what lay beyond, leaving any detail to the imagination. Out of the blue, he was overcome by an attack of vertigo. The hopper’s platform had no railings, and any flying carpet would have seemed like a spacious dance floor in comparison. Quickly reassuring himself that Heidrun and Walo were behind him, he passed Selene and the Luna Bar and followed the arch of the forehead round to the viewing platform. Figures started to move beneath him: O’Keefe, Olympiada and Miranda were making their way towards the airlock. He swivelled the jets, reduced his speed, overshot the terrace a little, turned and came to a standstill right next to the railing. Not the most elegant of landings. Alongside him, at an appropriate distance, Heidrun landed as if she had been flying hoppers her whole life. Meanwhile, Ögi flew a lap of honour amidst a great deal of cursing, then finally forced the hopper down, clattering one of the telescopic legs along the railing in the process.

‘I’m actually a gliding and ballooning enthusiast,’ he said apologetically, before unloading his box and carrying it to the airlock, a double bulkhead in the floor which measured several metres in diameter, ‘but Switzerland is a little more spacious.’

Tim jumped off his hopper.

‘Finn, we’re above you,’ he said. Lynn had connected their helmet radios with Gaia’s internal network so that everyone could communicate at once. A few seconds passed, then O’Keefe chimed in:

‘Okay, Tim. What should we do?’

‘Nothing just yet. We’ll call up the airlock elevator, send the boxes with the spacesuits down to you and—’

He stopped.

Was it his imagination, or had the floor begun to shake under his feet?

‘Hurry up!’ called O’Keefe. ‘It’s starting again!’

Where was the control console for the airlock? There. His fingers darted as he entered the command, and the air was sucked out at an agonisingly slow speed. The shaking intensified and became like an earthquake. Then the whole thing stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

‘The elevator’s on its way up,’ Ögi gasped breathlessly.

The airlock doors opened in the floor beneath them. A glass cabin pushed its way out, spacious enough to hold a dozen people, and opened at the front. They quickly piled the boxes inside.

‘I’ll go down with them,’ said Heidrun.

‘What?’ Ögi looked alarmed. ‘Why?’

‘To help them. With the suits, so it’s quicker.’ Before he could protest, she had disappeared into the cabin and pressed the down switch. The elevator closed.

‘My darling,’ whispered Ögi.

‘Don’t worry, commander. We’ll all be back in five minutes.’

Finn O’Keefe saw the elevator approaching, with someone in it whose slim legs were familiar to him even through centimetre-thick, steel-strengthened artificial fibres. He waited impatiently until the internal pressure was restored and the front bulkhead had glided to the side.

‘Here we go!’ said Heidrun, throwing the first of the boxes towards him.

Olympiada, as white as chalk, handed the second box on to Miranda, then began to empty her own.

‘Thank you,’ she said earnestly. ‘I’ll never forget this.’

In immense hurry, they slipped into their gear: helping one another, closing hinges, fastening clamps, heaving packs onto their backs and putting their helmets on.

‘Would it be asking too much to want to get out of the hotel right away?’ asked Miranda. ‘It’s just, you know, I don’t want to get blown into the sky, and I’ve emptied the minibar already, so—’

‘You can count on it,’ said Lynn’s voice.

‘Oh, don’t get me wrong,’ Miranda hurried to assure her. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your hotel.’

‘Yes, there is. It’s a piece of shit,’ said Lynn coldly.

Miranda giggled.

At that very moment, the floor gave way.

For one strange moment, Tim thought the entire opposite side of the ravine was being lifted up by elemental forces. Then, as he watched the grasshoppers hopping across the terrace and Ögi whooshing towards the railings with his arms flailing about, he lost his balance, landed on his stomach and slid behind the flying machines.

Gaia was bowing her head in face of the inevitable.

Chaos roared in his helmet. Anyone who had a voice was screaming in competition with all the others. He rolled over, got back on his feet and stretched out, which was a mistake, because he lost his balance again right away. He was pulled forcefully against the railing, tumbled right over it and smacked down onto the smooth, sloping glass surface.

And slid down.

No, he thought. No!

In fear and panic, he tried to get a grip on the reflective surface, but there was nothing there to get hold of. He slipped further, away from the protective enclosure of the terrace. One of the hoppers sailed down behind him and crashed onto the glass. Tim reached out for it and grasped the steering handle just as he saw another flying device disappear into the depths. It suddenly felt as if he were hovering in the air; he couldn’t get a grip any more and hung over the abyss, his legs flailing around. With his hand clamped onto the machine’s handle, he screamed ‘Stop!’ – and as if his plea, his wretched wish to survive, had been acknowledged somewhere out there amongst the cold gaze of the myriad stars, the movement of the huge skull came to an abrupt halt.

‘Tim! Tim!’

‘Everything’s okay, Lynn,’ he panted. ‘Everything’s—’

Okay? Nothing was okay. With both arms – thank God he wasn’t heavy – he pulled himself up on the flying device, noticing with relief that one of its telescopic legs had got wedged in the railings, then realising, with horror, that it was slowly slipping out.

A jolt went through the hopper.

Dismayed, Tim dangled in open air, unable to decide whether he should resume his ascent and thereby rip the hopper out of its anchorage once and for all, or not move at all, which would only delay his death by a few seconds. At the next moment, a figure appeared behind the terrace railing, climbed over it and slid carefully downwards, both hands bent around the rails.

‘Climb up onto me,’ panted Ögi. ‘Come on!’

Ögi’s feet were now level with Tim’s helmet, right next to him. Tim gasped for air, reached his arm out—

The hopper came loose.

Swinging back and forth, he hung on to Ögi’s ankles, grasped his shin guards, clung to his knees, climbed up him like a ladder and over the railing, then helped his rescuer to get back to safety. In front of them, tilted to about forty-five degrees, the floor of the terrace rose up into the heights like a smooth slide.

He had survived.

But they’d now lost all three grasshoppers.

‘No! I’m flying up there.’

Lynn pushed herself away from the control panel, crumpled over and fell against Mukesh. Horrified, the Indian stared at the wall monitor, watching the terrible images being transmitted by Tim’s camera and the external cameras on the opposite side of the ravine. The fibre-optic connection to the Mama Quilla Club had been broken, but they could now hear the voices of those trapped via the helmet radio.

‘It’s stopped.’ Miranda, out of breath. ‘What do we do now?’

‘Olympiada?’ O’Keefe.

‘I’m here.’ Olympiada spoke, sounding haggard.

‘Where?’

‘Behind the bar, I’m… behind the bar.’

‘My darling?’ Ögi, distraught. ‘Where on earth—’

‘I don’t know.’ Heidrun, sucking in air through her teeth. ‘Somewhere. Hit my head.’

‘Everyone out!’ Tim. ‘You can’t stay there. See whether the airlock is working.’

Lynn’s temples were throbbing with hypnotic rhythm. Colourful smog began to whirl around. Having to watch Gaia’s skull tilt so suddenly that the chin was now almost resting on the chest had made her heart stop, and now it was pumping all the harder to make up for it. Gaia looked as though she were sleeping. Her head must truly now be hanging on to the shoulders by a thread.

‘Everything’s at an angle,’ said O’Keefe. ‘We’re tumbling all over each other like skittles. I don’t know if we’ll even get into the airlock.’

Head. Head. Head. How much longer would her head stay on her shoulders?

‘We’ll come and get you,’ she said. ‘We still have seven grasshoppers. I’ll fly.’

‘Me too,’ said Mukesh.

‘We need a third. Quickly! Fetch Karla – she’s in the best state out of all of us.’

Mukesh hurried out. Lynn followed him and plundered the depot with the substitute spacesuits. Several were missing, including hers. Suddenly remembering that not all the suits were stored in the lobby, she ran back into the control centre and to the closed bulkhead on the rear wall. Behind it lay a small storeroom for spare equipment, including fire extinguishers, suits and air masks. She waited until the steel door had glided to the side, walked in, and was surprised to find the light on. Her gaze fell on the locker with the equipment, on the piles of boxes, on the dead faces of the air masks neatly lined up in their cabinets, and on the dead face of Sophie Thiel, who was leaning upright against the wall. Her eyes were open, and her pretty face had been divided in two by a streak of dried blood originating from a hole in her forehead.

Lynn didn’t move.

She just stood there, gawping at the corpse. Strangely – and thankfully, in the face of everything – it didn’t unleash any emotions in her. None at all. Maybe it was just the fact that its appearance was too much and too late, or the pushiness with which it demanded its moment in the limelight amidst an inferno of Dante-like proportions, as if they didn’t have other problems. So after a few seconds she ignored Sophie and started carrying out the boxes containing the bio-suits.

‘Hello, Lynn.’

She looked up, confused.

Dana Lawrence was standing in the doorway.

Heidrun and O’Keefe made their way hand over hand over table and chair legs, supporting, pulling and pushing Olympiada up towards the airlock. Contrary to what she had thought, the Russian woman had not fallen behind the bar but behind the DJ booth. Meanwhile, Miranda hung on to the side of the airlock like a monkey on a pole, her hand lying across the sensor field to keep it open.

‘Can you guys make it? Shall I help?’

‘I can get up there by myself,’ groaned Olympiada defiantly.

‘No, you can’t,’ said Heidrun. ‘Your leg is injured; you can hardly stand on it.’

The main problem resulting from the change to their spatial surroundings was not so much the tilting of the floor, as that of the airlock. The front section was now turned towards Gaia’s glass face and pointing downwards. And it wasn’t just that it was incredibly difficult to get into it in this way; if they didn’t watch out up there, they would fall outside faster than they intended.

‘You’ll have to try to get behind the elevator as soon as you get to the terrace,’ said Tim. ‘It will give you something to grip. Oh, and bring something long and sharp with you, like a knife.’

‘What for?’ groaned O’Keefe, as he steered Olympiada towards Miranda Winter’s outstretched hand.

‘To block the cabin so it doesn’t go down again.’

‘I said I could manage.’ Olympiada wrapped her hands around the cabin railing and pulled herself into the elevator with a grimly determined expression. ‘Go and look for your knife, Finn.’

They grasped the railing tightly and waited. O’Keefe was only gone for a minute. When he came back, carrying an ice pick, he had a wad of material flung over his shoulder. Miranda let the bulkheads close and pump the air out.

The cabin shuddered.

‘Not again,’ groaned Olympiada.

‘Don’t worry,’ Miranda reassured her. ‘It’ll stop in a second.’

‘What are you planning to do?’ asked Dana.

The bulkheads had finally opened and the armoured plating had crept back into the hidden cavities. Freed from her prison, Dana had jumped down from the gallery over the bridge into the lobby, all the while thinking through her next steps: to break off the rescue mission, capture the Callisto, and get the hell out of here. In the course of the past hour and a half, she had been forced to win back trust by making out she sympathised with Lynn, but that was over now. Julian’s hated daughter was alone in the control centre. She was no serious opponent; the loss of Dana’s weapon wouldn’t make the task easy, but she could make do with her hands.

‘I’m flying up there,’ said Lynn, her face devoid of any expression, then went back into the room and hauled out two large boxes containing spacesuits. Dana cocked her head. Had she not seen Sophie? No, there was no way she hadn’t seen her, but why did she seem so unaffected? Surely such a sight would have thrown her off track, but Lynn looked indifferent, as if she were on autopilot. Her gaze empty, she took off her jacket and began to unbutton her blouse.

‘Come on, Dana, get yourself a suit too.’

‘What for?’

‘You’re flying one of the hoppers. The more of us there are, the quicker—’ Suddenly she stopped and stared at Dana with her red-rimmed eyes. ‘Hey, you’ve piloted the Callisto before, right?’

Dana came slowly closer, bent over and readied her own bodily murder weapons.

‘Yes,’ she said slowly.

‘Good, then we’ll do it like that. No hoppers.’

Incoherent conversation came out of the loudspeakers, hastily uttered sentences. Silently, Dana walked around the console.

‘Hey, Dana!’ Lynn wrinkled her forehead. ‘Are you listening to me?’

She moved faster. Lynn craned her head back, looked her up and down from beneath her half-closed eyelids and took a step back. Her expression came back to life. A hardly perceptible flicker betrayed her suspicion.

‘You’ll fly the Callisto, do you hear me?’

Sure, thought Dana, but without you.

‘No, that won’t be necessary!’

As if she’d been hit by lightning, Dana stopped and turned round. Nina had come into the control centre, accompanied by Karla. She was dressed in her spacesuit, carrying her helmet under her arm, and looked thoroughly contrite.

‘I’m sorry, Lynn, Miss Lawrence, I’m very sorry indeed: I wasn’t at my post. I fell asleep in the rest area. Karla walked past me three times, but then she managed to find me after all and told me everything. I’ll fly the shuttle.’

Dana forced a smile. She would have been confident enough of taking on Lynn and Karla, but Nina Hedegaard was incredibly fit and had quick reflexes. At that moment, Mukesh Nair stormed in, bathed in sweat, and the bubble of Dana’s quick getaway burst.

‘Karla,’ he called, exhausted. ‘There you are. And Nina! Miss Lawrence, thank heavens.’

‘Our plan has changed,’ said Lynn. ‘Nina’s flying up with the shuttle.’ She walked over to the console and spoke into the microphone: ‘Sushma, Eva, back to the control centre. Right away!’

Dana folded her arms behind her back. Nina was by far the better pilot; any objections on her part would have been futile.

‘You have a lot to make up for,’ she said strictly. ‘I’m sure you realise that.’

‘I’m sorry, really I am!’ Nina lowered her gaze. ‘I’ll get them out of there.’

‘I’ll come too. You’ll need help.’

Without waiting for an answer, Dana walked across the control centre, went into the room containing Sophie’s corpse and jumped back. Feigning rage and horror, she spun round towards Lynn.

‘Damn it! Why didn’t you tell me about that?’

‘Because it’s not important,’ answered Lynn calmly.

‘Not important? Again something that’s not important? Are you completely insa—’

In a flash, Lynn stormed over, grabbed Dana by the neck and threw her against the doorframe, making her head jerk back and crash against it painfully.

‘Just you dare,’ she hissed.

‘You are insane.’

‘If you suggest one more time that I’m insane, you’ll get a very tangible impression of what insanity really is. Mukesh, put your suit on, the box with the XL label! Karla, box S!’

Dana stared at her with unconcealed rage. Her entire body was trembling. She could have killed Julian’s daughter with a few unspectacular hand movements, right this very second. Without breaking eye contact, she put one finger after another around Lynn’s wrist and wrenched it from her throat.

‘Now, now, Lynn,’ she whispered. ‘Not in front of the guests! How would that look?’

After Gaia’s last nod, the airlock was jutting out from the viewing platform at such an angle that it was now pointing at the far-away Earth like a cannon. They held on to the railing, and each other, as the cabin bulkheads glided to the side.

‘Oh, wonderful,’ said Miranda sarcastically. The view over the terrace couldn’t have been more worrying.

The world had tipped by forty-five degrees; millions of tonnes of rock seemed to be eager to topple towards them from the ravine opposite. Where the terrace ended, Tim and Ögi were huddled against the railing to prevent whichever one of them might lose their grip from falling into the depths. Miranda reached out for the frame of the open airlock, grasped hold of it and pulled herself outside. The boots of her bio-suit were equipped with powerful treads to prevent them from slipping. Her fingers found a grip in an indentation. With her legs spread and the unrolled wad of material – several tablecloths from Selene knotted together – slung around her hips, she worked her way up the slope. The makeshift rope had been O’Keefe’s brilliant idea; the other end of it was fastened to Olympiada’s chest guard.

‘Okay. Pass her towards me.’

Heidrun steered the Russian woman out of the airlock, waited until she had a firm grasp on the railing, then let her go. Olympiada immediately crumpled over and slipped down the slope, but instead of falling she hung on the end of Miranda’s umbilical cord. Miranda climbed further up along the shaft of the cabin until she was able to crawl under it. With her feet wedged against the wall of the shaft, she heaved Olympiada up, unknotted the cloth and let it back down. Heidrun then hurried swiftly upwards, followed by O’Keefe, who had rammed the ice pick into the airlock door to prevent it from shutting and sending the shaft back down.

‘Everything okay there?’ called Ögi.

‘More than okay!’ said Heidrun.

‘Good. We’re coming up to you.’

It was relatively easy to pull themselves up over the railing, but once they got there it was still a fair distance to the airlock. Miranda threw the rope to them. After two attempts, Tim finally got hold of it, knotted it around the bars of the railing, and they made their way across hand over hand. It was incredibly tight behind the cabin with six of them, but at least they had a stable wall at their backs to prevent them from sliding down. They clung on alongside one another, hardly daring to move through fear that too much movement could tip Gaia’s head clean off.

‘Lynn, everyone’s outside now,’ said Tim.

The glass wall shook. Heidrun reached for Ögi’s hand.

‘Lynn?’

No answer.

‘Strange,’ sighed Miranda. ‘I never thought I’d end up regretting it.’

‘Regretting what?’ asked Olympiada hoarsely.

‘The swimming accident.’

‘Before Miami?’ She cleared her throat. ‘The one you went to court for?’

‘Yes, exactly. My poor Louis.’

‘What exactly do you regret?’ asked O’Keefe, tired. ‘The fact that he died, or that you helped?’

‘I was found innocent,’ said Miranda, in an almost cheerful tone. ‘They couldn’t prove anything.’

A new quake ran through Gaia’s skull and refused to let up. Olympiada groaned and fastened her grip to O’Keefe’s thigh.

‘Lynn!’ screamed Tim. ‘What’s going on there?’

‘Tim?’ It was Lynn. Finally! ‘Hold on, I’m on my way. We’re coming to get you.’

Lynn had insisted on their all leaving the Gaia together. In the maelstrom of her disintegrating sanity, the realisation still won through that Dana was playing dirty somehow, and that it wouldn’t have been a good idea to let her fly alone with Nina. Resolving both evacuation and rescue at the same time seemed to be the most efficient plan, and had a sense of well-ordered finality. She graciously acknowledged Dana’s laboriously concealed rage and ferocious hate and felt herself become strangely calm. Yet at the same time she was overwhelmed by the desire to roar with laughter. It was just that, if she started, she probably wouldn’t ever be able to stop.

They went into the sweltering body of the Callisto. Nina opened the rear hatch and ignited the jets. They rose vertically up into the star-sprinkled circus dome, below which they had once had the best seats in the house for viewing magic tricks and clownery, and where they now had to pull off the murderous acrobatics of saving lives.

‘Hey, you guys,’ said Nina. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Not for much longer,’ prophesied Heidrun.

‘We can forget the shuttle airlock. It’s too near to the engines, and I have to maintain the counter-thrust in order not to slip. I’ll approach in reverse with the rear hatch open, okay? I’ll have to avoid touching the head, so get ready to do some chin-ups.’

‘Chin-ups, somersaults, we’ll do whatever you want.’

They ascended further. First Gaia’s back was visible from the cockpit of the shuttle, then the neck with its exposed steel backbone came into full view. Lynn couldn’t help thinking about what Gaia embodied in Julian’s eyes: her own image, to excess. And they really were becoming more and more alike. Two queens about to lose their heads.

The Callisto rose up slowly over the curve of the skull.

O’Keefe helped the others onto their feet. Pressed between the airlock wall and the terrace floor, they gripped to one another and waved at the helmeted silhouette behind the cockpit window. The shuttle began to turn on its axis, first turning its side towards them, then the open rear with the lowered tailboard.

‘Nearer!’ shouted Tim.

A jolt went through the head. Ögi lost his grip and was caught by Heidrun. The Callisto swivelled two of its jets. With absolute precision, Nina Hedegaard steered the huge craft backwards. The tailboard came closer, closer still, too close—

‘Stop!’

The shuttle stopped, motionless in open space.

‘Can you make it?’ asked Nina.

O’Keefe raised both hands, grabbed the edge and pulled himself up onto the tailboard with a powerful swinging motion. He turned round right away, lay down on his stomach and stretched his arms out below.

‘Nina? Can you lower the machine a little further?’

‘I’ll try.’

His right hand brushed Heidrun’s fingertips. The Callisto sank another metre, now hovering at helmet-height across from the others.

‘That’s as far as I can go,’ said Nina. ‘I’m afraid of touching the head.’

‘That’ll do.’ Heidrun clambered up to O’Keefe on the hatch. To the right of her, Ögi pulled himself up, crouched down and grasped Olympiada, who was handed up to him from below, steadying herself on his shoulder. Hands stretched out towards Miranda and Tim, helping them up.

‘We made it,’ whispered Olympiada, then crumpled over, as the damaged bone in her shin finally broke. With a scream, she rolled over the edge of the hatch and tumbled back into the tiny gap between the terrace and the airlock.

‘Olympiada!’

Miranda, who was almost all the way up, dropped back down next to the Russian woman and grabbed her under the arms.

‘No – don’t—’

‘Are you crazy? Up you go – as if I would leave you lying here.’

‘I’m useless,’ whimpered Olympiada.

‘No, you’re wonderful, you just don’t know it yet.’

Miranda effortlessly lifted the petite woman up and towards O’Keefe, who pulled her back onto the tailboard and handed her over to Tim.

‘Yeah!’ called Miranda. ‘See, there was nothing to it!’

She laughed and stretched her arms out. O’Keefe went to grab her, but her hands were suddenly out of reach. Confused, he leaned his upper body further forward. She was moving away from him at an ever greater speed, and for a moment he thought Nina had flown away without her. Then he realised the shuttle hadn’t moved an inch.

Gaia’s head was breaking off!

‘Miranda!’ he screamed.

He could hear her choking gasps in his helmet as if she were right there next to him, while her tottering form dwindled before his eyes. She was waving her arms wildly, which in some gruesome way could have been mistaken for a gesture of exuberance, the way they knew her to be, always in a good mood, always pushing herself to the very limit, but as she called O’Keefe’s name, her voice expressed the absolute despair of a person who knew that nothing and no one would be able to save them.

‘Finn! Finn! – Finn!’

‘Miranda!’

Then she fell.

Her body tipped over the cabin shaft, flashed in the sunlight and then disappeared behind the head of Gaia, which did a half-turn, seemed to stand still for a moment, then fell completely from the shoulders, crashing into the immense Romanesque window of the abdominal wall.

‘Inside, everyone inside!’ shouted O’Keefe, his voice cracking. ‘Nina!’

‘What’s wrong, Finn, we—’

‘She fell!’ He jumped into the cargo hold. ‘Miranda fell overboard; you have to go round to the front section.’

‘Is everyone else in?’

His eyes darted around. Next to him, Tim stumbled across, a groaning Olympiada in his arms, and collapsed down to the floor of the hold.

‘Yes! Quickly, for heaven’s sake, go quickly!’

Not waiting until the hatch was closed, he ran like crazy to the connecting bulkhead and pushed himself through while there was still barely a crack’s width open. Stumbling along the central gangway, he was hurled against a seat, the revving of the engines in his ears as Nina steered the Callisto backwards over the figure’s tattered stump of a neck. Then he struggled to his feet again and rushed into the cockpit.

And looked down.

The abdominal cavity was destroyed. Fireballs appeared which extinguished as soon as they were ignited. Rubble rained down as the ribcage containing the suites collapsed floor by floor. Then, Gaia’s immense, regal skull, the glazing on the face surprisingly still intact, rolled over the gentle inclination of the upper thigh towards the valley, passed the knee almost hesitantly and shattered on the plateau two hundred metres below.

‘Go down! Down!’

The shuttle sank, but Miranda was nowhere to be seen, neither on the upper surface of the thigh, now covered in debris, nor on the moon surface around it.

‘To the plateau! She was torn down with it! You have to—’

‘Finn—’

‘No! Look! Look for her!’

Without arguing, Nina turned the shuttle around, descended further and flew in a curve directly over and around the widely scattered remains of the head. By now, the others were gathering together in the space behind the cockpit.

‘She can’t have disappeared!’ screamed O’Keefe.

‘Finn.’

He felt the soft pressure of a hand on his upper arm and turned round. Heidrun had taken her helmet off and was looking at him with red eyes.

‘She can’t have just disappeared,’ he repeated softly.

‘She’s dead, Finn. Miranda’s dead.’

He stared at her.

Then he started to cry. Blinded by tears, he sank to the floor in front of Heidrun. He couldn’t remember ever having cried.

Lynn sat in the first row of seats, distancing herself from the group, completely expressionless. She had beamed her former light for the last time, had unified the group in the glow of the dying star that she was, had illuminated them, blinded and driven back Dana, her enemy, but the fuel of her life’s energy was used up now, her collapse unavoidable. Everything inside her skull was rushing around with maximum kinetic energy: impressions, facts, probability of occurrences. Dependable knowledge was pulverised into hypotheses. The unending condensing of impressions caused them to be fractured into the smallest, the very smallest thought particles, to which no time, no perceptual level, no history could be assigned. Increasingly brief thought phases, thought particles whirling at the speed of light, a collapsing spirit, unceasingly crashing without the opposing pressure of will, falling short of the event horizon, no transmission, only reception now, ongoing compromise, the end of all processes, of all contour, all form, just situation, and even the pitiful remains of what had once been Lynn Orley would corrode and evaporate under their own pressure, leaving nothing behind but an abandoned, imaginary space.

Someone had died. So many had died.

Her memory was empty.

London, Great Britain

Yoyo, presumed missing, had arrived at the stroke of 22.00 just as Diane was carrying out the electronic exhumation of a person presumed dead. Presumed, because no one had been able to get even a fleeting glance of the corpse. Because it was still undiscovered, as all objects moving in unknown or unpredictable orbits tend to be.

‘Victor Thorn, known as Vic,’ Jericho said, without deigning to ask Yoyo why five minutes had turned into three hours and what Tu was up to in his state of rage.

‘I’m sorry, I…’ Yoyo fidgeted hesitantly. She had a frog in her throat and it had to come out. ‘I know I was planning to be back much sooner—’

‘Commander of the first moon base occupation. A NASA man. In 2021, he ran the show for six months.’

‘—Tian isn’t really like that. I mean, you know him.’

‘It seems that Thorn did a good job. So good, that in 2024 they entrusted him with another six-month mission.’

‘To be honest, we haven’t spoken that much,’ said Yoyo, a little shrilly. The frog was croaking on her tongue. ‘He was just terribly angry. We ended up watching a film, pretending everything was normal, you know. It was probably the worst conceivable moment, but you shouldn’t believe—’

‘Yoyo.’ Jericho sighed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s your business. It has nothing to do with me.’

‘Of course it has something to do with you!’

The frog was on the move.

‘No, it doesn’t.’ To his amazement, he meant it. The old, unconquered hurt which had lingered on him so long, like a bad odour on clothes, gave way to the insight that neither Tu nor Yoyo was responsible for his bad mood. However well they were getting on, it really had nothing to do with him. ‘It’s your lives, your story. You don’t have to tell me anything.’

Yoyo stared at the monitor unhappily. Their surroundings left a little to be desired in terms of intimacy. The space in the information centre had been screened in a makeshift way; people were working all around them, like microorganisms in the abdominal cavity of the Big O, digesting and processing information, then expelling it.

‘And if I want to tell you something?’

‘Then now is definitely not a good time.’

‘Fine.’ She sighed. ‘So what’s this about Thorn?’

‘Well, assuming that the explosion of the mini-nuke was planned for 2024 without fail – then someone must have been up there at the time: to hide, position and ignite the bomb. Either that or someone else was supposed to travel on after it and do that.’

‘Sounds logical.’

‘But no explosion was registered, and the people from MI6 think that storing a mini-nuke in a vacuum for too long could pose the risk of a premature decay. So why wasn’t it ignited?’

Yoyo looked at him, a small, steep line of thoughtfulness between her eyes.

‘Because the person in question wasn’t able to carry out the ignition as planned. Because something happened.’

‘Correct. So I sent Diane on the hunt. There’s information on the internet about all the space missions in the last year, and I stumbled across Thorn. A fatal accident during an external mission on the OSS, on 2 August 2024. It was completely unexpected and happened before he could take up his position on the Peary Base, but the most significant thing is that it was almost three months to the day after Mayé’s satellite was launched.’

Yoyo gnawed at her lower lip.

‘And the Chinese? Have you checked?’

‘You can’t “check” the Chinese,’ said Jericho. ‘The best you can find is their own statements, and according to them there was no loss of personnel in 2024.’

‘Apart from the Moon crisis. The commander of the Chinese base was imprisoned by the Americans.’

‘Oh, come on! First they shoot an atomic bomb up to the Moon as part of some unbelievably elaborate and sophisticated camouflage manoeuvre, then a few taikonauts stumble into American mining territory like a couple of idiots and get themselves caught?’

‘Hmm.’ Yoyo wrinkled her forehead. ‘So someone took the elevator. But to do that they would either have had to plant someone in an authorised team—’

‘Or bribe someone who was already in it.’

‘And Thorn was in the team.’

‘On his mission to the Moon, all official and above board.’ Jericho nodded. ‘In the role of a commander, with almost unlimited access. And above all, he knew his way around up there like the back of his hand. He’d been there before.’

‘Have you told Shaw and Norrington about this?’ Yoyo’s eyes were gleaming. Suddenly she was a Guardian again, infected by curiosity.

‘No.’ Jericho stood up. ‘But I think we should remedy that right away.’

Shaw and Norrington were wandering around somewhere in the Big O with delegates from MI5, but Edda Hoff gobbled up the fillet steak of their investigations hungrily. She knew about Thorn’s case of course, but so far no one had come up with the idea that the respected two-time commander of the Peary Base might have been the chosen one for blowing Gaia to smithereens. She promised to put together some information about Thorn and fill her superiors in on Jericho’s theory. Then Tu Tian reappeared, looking perfectly composed, as if nothing had happened. He told a joke and listened to the latest news before retreating into the guest area.

‘Business,’ he said, with an apologetic gesture. ‘The day’s just getting started in China. Armies of hard-working competitors are sharpening their knives; I can’t act as if I don’t have a company to run. So if you don’t need me to save the world—’

‘No, not right this moment, Tian.’

‘Excellent. Fenshou!’

Shaw and Norrington came back in, but Hoff was tied up in a video conversation with NASA. Jericho was just about to speak to Shaw about Vic Thorn when Tom Merrick announced that, in all probability, he had found the reason for the communication blockade but was unable to lift it.

‘Knowing why it doesn’t work is still progress,’ said Shaw as they gathered in the large conference room.

‘As I already mentioned’ – Merrick’s gaze flitted from one face to the next – ‘to be able to cut the Moon off from all communication, you’d need to interfere with so many satellites and ground control stations that it would be practically impossible. So my guess is that it’s something else: IOF.’

‘IO what?’ said Shaw.

Merrick looked at her as if he found it incomprehensible that people didn’t talk exclusively in abbreviations.

‘Information Overflow.’

‘Paralysis of the terminal device by botnet mass mails,’ said Yoyo. ‘Data congestion.’

One of the MI6 people present looked confused.

‘Imagine there’s someone sitting in a room, and you want to silence them,’ she explained. ‘And you don’t want them to be able to hear either. Assuming that you succeed in getting your hands on all the keys, you’ll try to bolt all the doors in order to cut them off from the world. The doors are the satellites and ground control stations, but you can’t stop more and more doors being built in, not to mention the fact that you won’t be able to get all the keys anyway. The alternative is incredibly simple. You just go into the room, put a gag in their mouth and cotton wool in their ears.’

‘So, as far as I understand it, that man is Gaia’s computer.’

‘Two men,’ said Merrick. ‘Gaia’s computer and the Peary Base system.’

‘Don’t they have any mirror systems?’ asked Jericho.

‘Okay, four men then.’ Merrick waved his hand impatiently. ‘Or even more, as it’s possible the shuttles’ satellite receivers were gagged too. In any case, the procedure is much more efficient because you only interfere with the terminal device, that is the IP addresses of the people you want to target. Everything is fine with the satellites –, you can have a million of them flying around and it won’t change anything, quite the contrary. Nowadays, satellites and ground control stations function increasingly as knots in an IP network, like an internet in space! The botnet can jump from one knot to another in order to fight its way through.’

Jericho realised immediately that Merrick was right. In essence, botnets were old hat. Hackers gained control over as many computers as possible by implanting special software. Generally speaking, the users didn’t know that it would make their computers turn into bots, soldiers of an automated army. Theoretically, the illegal software could lie dormant in the infiltrated computers indefinitely, until it awakened at a pre-programmed time and prompted its host computer to ceaselessly send emails to a defined target: totally legal enquiries, but in torrential proportions. On the black market for cyberterrorism, networks with up to 100,000 bots had been exposed. When the botnet struck, it simultaneously fired billions of emails and flooded the target with data, until the attacked computer was no longer able to cope with the volume and perished under IOF, Information Overload.

‘What are your thoughts, Tom?’ asked Shaw. ‘How long can they keep their attacks up for?’

‘It’s difficult to say. Botnets are usually unstoppable. You tell the software in advance how long it should keep at it for, then smuggle it in. After that, there’s no way of getting to it.’

‘So you can also program into the software when it should stop?’

‘Sure, you can do anything. But my suspicion is that the one we’re dealing with is a little different. The attack came as a direct reaction to our attempt to warn Julian and the Gaia, so someone must have started the bots individually.’

‘Which means they must have directed a query at this someone after the software was installed,’ said Yoyo. ‘And that question was: Shall I attack? So the person in question must have said yes at some stage.’

‘And while they were attacking the Gaia and the Peary Base, they directed another query at Mister Unknown,’ nodded Merrick. ‘This time: Shall I stop?’

‘So if we only knew who started it—’ said the MI6 man.

‘Then we could make him stop it.’

‘Where could the person be?’ asked Shaw.

Merrick stared at her. ‘How should I know? There could be a number of people involved. The person who set the attacks in motion could be on the Moon. If he smuggled control software into the Gaia’s computer, then it would have been no problem for him to start the bots from there, although admittedly he would have crippled himself in the process. So I suspect the jerk who can stop all this madness is somewhere on Earth. For heaven’s sake, Jennifer!’ His arms flailed around wildly. ‘He could be anywhere. He could be here. In the Big O. In this very room!’

Not long after, they heard from Gerald Palstein. The face staring at them through the monitor window from Texas looked dejected, and Jericho couldn’t help being reminded of Shaw’s words, about the unpleasant decisions EMCO’s chief strategist was responsible for on a daily basis.

Then he looked closer.

No, it was something else. Palstein looked like someone who had just been given devastating news.

‘I can supply you with the film now,’ he said wearily.

‘You were able to speak to your contact?’ Shaw’s voice sneaked up, cautious and tentative.

‘No.’ Palstein rubbed his eyes. ‘Something happened.’

For a moment his forehead appeared in disproportion to the rest of his body as he leaned forward and pressed something underneath the transmission camera. Then the image changed, and they saw a news report from CNN.

‘An incomprehensible tragedy took place today in Vancouver in Canada,’ said Christine Roberts, the smartly dressed frontwoman of Breaking News. ‘In an act of unprecedented violence, practically the entire leadership of the internet portal Greenwatch has been wiped out. The ecologically orientated station, known for its engaged and critical reportage, has contributed again and again to the resolution of environmental scandals in recent years, as well as bringing multiple suits against companies and politicians. They were known to be balanced and fair. Our correspondent in Vancouver can now speak to us. Rick Lester, are there any indications yet as to who could be behind the bloodbath which may mean the end of Greenwatch?’

The picture changed. Early evening light. A man in front of a Canadian villa-style property, crime-scene tape fluttering all around him, along with police vehicles and uniformed officers.

‘No, Christine, and that’s exactly what makes the whole thing so eerie: so far there are no clues at all as to who is responsible for these murders, or rather executions, and above all, why.’ Rick Lester spoke in an emphasised staccato, pausing after every half-sentence. ‘Greenwatch were working, as we now know, on an extensive report about the destruction of the boreal forest in Canada and other parts of the world, so that would make the oil industry a prime suspect, but the report was more looking back at what damage has been caused over the years, that can’t be undone, and at first glance there’s nothing there which could serve as an explanation for a massacre like this.’

‘There’s now talk of ten fatalities, Rick. What exactly happened, and what names are amongst the victims?’

‘So, I should add that this is probably a concerted action, because it not only affected the headquarters of Greenwatch, where seven people have been found dead’ – he turned slightly to indicate the scene behind him – ‘but a quarter of an hour before there was also a wild pursuit on Marine Drive, a coastal road that leads out to Point Grey, and witnesses claim to have seen a large four-by-four repeatedly ram into a Thunderbird containing three Greenwatch staff, and then intentionally cause an accident. It seems that two of the people in the car initially survived the crash, but were then immediately shot. One of the victims is, incidentally, the chief reporter of Greenwatch, Loreena Keowa. So the murderers may have driven on to the Greenwatch headquarters, here at Point Grey, gained access and created this bloodbath within a matter of minutes.’

‘A bloodbath which – according to the latest reports – also cost the director, Susan Hudsucker, her life?’

‘Yes, that has been confirmed.’

‘It’s terrible, Rick, really unbelievable, but it’s not just the murders which are giving the investigators clues, but some things which seem to have disappeared—’

‘That’s right, Christine, and this shines a particular light on the incident. Because there is not one single computer to be found in the whole building; all of Green-watch’s data has been stolen, as well as handwritten notes, so pretty much the station’s entire memory.’

‘Rick, doesn’t that imply that someone here was trying to prevent the publication of potentially controversial information?’

Lester nodded. ‘Someone was undoubtedly trying to delay its publication, and we’ve just heard that contact has been made with freelance workers to find out more about the current projects, but Greenwatch always took great pains to keep hot information and stories within the inner circle right up to the last moment, so it could mean those final projects will never be reconstructed.’

‘An immense tragedy indeed. So, that’s all from Vancouver for now, thank you, Rick Lester. And now—’

The recording came to an end. Palstein reappeared, alone in front of the polished mahogany table in his conference room in Dallas.

‘Was that your contact person?’ asked Shaw. ‘The woman in the car?’

‘Yes.’ Palstein nodded. ‘Loreena Keowa.’

‘And you think the events are directly connected to the assassination attempt in Calgary?’

‘I don’t know.’ Palstein sighed. ‘A film clip turned up showing a man. He could be the assassin, but does that justify a massacre like this? I mean, I’m in possession of the pictures too, and Loreena said she showed them to a number of people. We were planning to talk on the phone right after her landing in Vancouver, I asked her to call me without fail—’

‘Because you were worried.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Palstein shook his head. ‘It was like she was obsessed with the case. I was very worried.’

‘Mr Palstein,’ said Jericho, ‘how quickly could we get hold of the film? Every second—’

‘No problem. I can show you the extract right away.’

The picture changed once again. This time they saw the entrance hall of a building. Jericho thought he recognised the run-down façade: the empty business complex opposite the Imperial Oil HQ in Calgary, from which the shot at Palstein was alleged to have been fired. People were walking around aimlessly. Two men and a woman came out of the building into the sunlight. The men joined a policeman and engaged him in conversation, while the woman positioned herself to the side. A figure crept up from the left, a fat, bulky man with long black hair.

Jericho leaned forwards. A still image appeared on the monitor, just a head and shoulders. He was clearly an Asian man. A corpulent, unkempt appearance, greasy hair, his beard thin and dishevelled; but what couldn’t be accomplished with a bit of latex, foam and make-up?

Even Yoyo was staring at the Asian man.

‘Almost unrecognisable,’ she whispered.

Shaw looked at her keenly. ‘You know him?’

‘Absolutely.’ Jericho nodded. He couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Unbelievable, but it’s him!’

The disguise was worthy of an Oscar, but the circumstances under which they had met him meant they couldn’t be misled. Jericho had already fallen for it once, but wouldn’t let it happen again, even if the bastard covered himself in fur and went down on all fours.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is without a doubt the Calgary assassin.’

Shaw raised her eyebrows. ‘And do you have a name?’

‘Yes, but it won’t help you much. The guy is as volatile as gas. His name is Xin. Kenny Xin.’

Sinus Iridum, The Moon

The Land of Mist.

It was only after getting to the Moon that Evelyn had learned the astronauts’ name for the mining zone, and to her the term seemed corny and inapplicable. According to her school education, mist was a meteorological phenomenon, an aerosol, and there was certainly no droplet formation on the Moon. She had asked around as to whether the name resulted from some pretentious need to pay homage to Riccioli and his historical misinterpretations, but didn’t receive any adequate answers. In general, the zone was hardly ever discussed. Julian had scheduled in a presentation of a documentary for the last day of their stay; so there were no plans to visit the mining zone at all.

But now that she had ended up here after all, one glance was enough to make her see why prosaic minds had named the stretch of land between Sinus Iridum and Mare Imbrium the Land of Mist. A flat, iridescent barrier stretched out from horizon to horizon, over a kilometre high and not in the slightest bit suited to lifting Chambers’ mood. It weighed down on the land desolately, hopelessness which had turned into dust. No one in their right mind would feel the desire to cross it.

But Hanna’s wheel tracks led right into it.

He had driven down the path for several hundred metres, then veered off in a north-easterly direction. According to Julian, he was travelling along the imaginary line that linked Cape Heraclides to Cape Laplace. Giving in to the conflicting hope that their opponent might be a survival expert, and possibly the better pathfinder, they followed in his tracks. Amber continued to study her maps, but as good as their services had been so far, here they proved to be useless. Everywhere they looked, visibility was cut short by mist, sometimes after a hundred metres, but mostly after just ten. There was no horizon now, no hills, no mountain ranges, only Hanna’s solitary tracks on his way into the unknown. Something that fed on life itself crept up out of the dust, weighed heavily on Chambers’ ribcage and unleashed in her the childlike longing to cry. The Moon was dead matter, and yet until now she had seen it as strangely alive, like an old and wise human being, a wonderful Methuselah, whose wrinkles preserved the history of creation. Here, though, history seemed to have been erased. The familiar powdery consistency of the regolith, its gentle slopes and miniature craters, had given way to crumbly uniformity, as if something had glided over and subjected it to an eerie transformation. For a moment, she thought she could make out the edge of a small crater, but it vanished into dust before her eyes, mere hallucination.

‘There’s nothing left here to get your bearings from,’ said Julian to Amber. ‘The beetles have changed the landscape permanently.’

Beetles? Evelyn stopped. She couldn’t recall ever having heard of beetles being on the Moon. But whatever they were up to, in her eyes it amounted to desecration. All around them, it looked as though someone had inflicted grievous bodily harm on the satellite. This crumbly stuff was the ashes of the dead. It was racked up in parallel, shallow ramparts, like powerful furrows, as if something had been ploughing the ground.

‘Julian, it looks awful here,’ she said.

‘I know. Not exactly the dream destination for tourists. People only ever come here if there are problems the maintenance robots can’t cope with.’

‘And what in God’s name are the beetles?’

‘Look over there.’ Julian raised his arm and pointed ahead. ‘That’s one.’

She squinted. At first she just saw the sunlight flickering on the dust particles. Then, amidst enigmatic grey tones, a silhouette came into view at an indefinable distance from them, a thing of primeval appearance. It slowly pushed its hunched, strangely weightless-looking body forwards, making bizarre details visible: a rotating jaw system beneath a low, oblate head, which rummaged industriously through the regolith, insectoid legs spread out wide. Unrelentingly, it kept adding to the dust across the plateau, causing it to whirl around as it continued to eat and move forwards. The microscopic suspended matter enshrouded its bulky body, surrounding its legs like a cocoon. By now, Evelyn was pretty sure she knew what she was looking at, except all her perceptions were stunted by the impression of just how inconceivably powerful the beetle was. The nearer they got to it, the more monstrous it looked, stretching out its humpback, which was covered in enormous, glinting, shell-like mirrors, a mythical monster, as tall as a high-rise building.

Julian bore down on it. ‘Momoka, stay behind me,’ he ordered. ‘We have to stick together. If we want to stay on course, we can’t avoid getting close to these machines. They’re sluggish, but sluggishness is relative when you consider their size.’

The visibility got worse. By the time the velvety regolith was under their wheels again, just before they reached the beetle, its torso was outlined, dark and threatening, against the clouded sky. For its enormous height, it was astonishingly narrow.

It disappeared behind plumes of whirling dust. As the giant lifted one of its powerful, many-jointed legs and took a step forwards, it seemed to Evelyn as if it was ever so slowly swivelling its stooped skull around to look at them. The rover juddered softly. She put it down to Momoka driving over a bump on the ground, but an inner certainty told her it had happened at the very moment when the beetle rammed its foot into the regolith.

‘A mining machine!’ Rogachev turned round to stare at the vanishing silhouette. ‘Fantastic! How could you have kept that from me for so long?’

‘We call them beetles,’ said Julian. ‘On account of their shape and the way they move. And yes, they are fantastic. But there are far too few of them.’

‘Do they turn the regolith into this – stuff?’ asked Evelyn, thinking of the crumbly wasteland.

Julian hesitated. ‘As I said, they transform the landscape.’

‘I was just wondering, I mean, I wasn’t really sure how the mining takes place. I thought, I mean, I expected to see something along the lines of drilling rigs.’

As soon as the words had left her mouth, she felt ashamed for discussing mining techniques with Julian so casually, as if forgetting that Momoka had been confronted with Locatelli’s deformed corpse just half an hour before. Since their departure from the Cape, the Japanese woman had not uttered a single word, but she was certainly driving the rover with care. She had retreated within herself, in an eerie, ghostly way. The creature behind the reflective visor pane steering the vehicle could easily have been mistaken for a robot.

‘Helium-3 can’t be produced in the same way as oil, gas or coal,’ said Julian. ‘The isotope is atomically bound into the moon dust. Around three nanograms per gram of regolith, evenly distributed.’

‘Nanogram, wait a moment,’ pondered Evelyn. ‘That’s a billionth of a gram, right?’

‘So little?’ Rogachev was stunned.

‘Not that little,’ said Julian. ‘Just think, the stuff was stored up over billions of years by solar wind. Far over half a billion tonnes in total, ten times as much as all the coal, oil and gas reserves on Earth! That’s a hell of a lot! It’s just that, in order to get to it, you have to process the moon surface too.’

So that’s what you call it, thought Evelyn. Processing. And out of that comes a wasteland of crumb-like debris. Feeling uneasy, she stared off into the glistening distance. Far behind them, a second beetle was creeping through the dust, and suddenly the terrain became ugly and crumbly again.

‘And yet it’s an astonishingly low concentration,’ Rogachev persisted. ‘It sounds to me as though vast amounts of lunar soil would need to be processed. How deep do those things burrow down into the ground?’

‘Two to three metres. Helium-3 can still be found even five metres down, but they get most of it from above that.’

‘And that’s enough?’

‘It depends what for.’

‘I mean, is it enough to supply the world with helium-3?’

‘Well, it was enough to make the fossil energy market collapse on Earth.’

‘It collapsed prematurely. How many machines are in use at the moment?’

‘Thirty. Believe me, Oleg, helium-3 represents a lasting solution to our energy problems, and the Moon can provide it. But you’re right of course. We need a lot more machines to be able to graze all the terrain.’

‘Graze,’ echoed Amber. ‘That sounds more like a cow than a beetle.’

‘Yes.’ Julian’s laughter was a little forced. ‘They really do move across the land like herds. Like a herd of cows.’

‘Impressive,’ said Rogachev, but Evelyn thought she could detect a hint of scepticism. The silhouette of a third beetle came into sight in the hazy distance. It seemed to be standing still. Evelyn’s attention was drawn to something agile, something smaller, that was approaching the machine from behind, at first glance a flying machine, until the suspicion took hold that the thing was hurrying over on high, intricate legs, and she couldn’t help thinking of a spider. The apparition paused underneath the monstrous abdomen, ducked down, and seemed to temporarily merge with the beetle. Evelyn stared at it curiously. She wanted to ask Julian, but Momoka’s silence weighed heavily over the group like a stormy sky, so she held her tongue, deeply unsettled. This insectarium was not at all to her liking. Not that she had anything against technology: she conscientiously drove her environmentally friendly electric car, had converted her home to Locatelli’s solar technology and always separated her trash – though she certainly couldn’t claim a devoutly green mindset. Phenomena like robotics, nanotechnology and space travel were just as interesting to her as waterfalls, giant sequoia trees and the endangered tufted-ear marmosets, whose continued existence couldn’t necessarily be regarded as essential to the Earth’s ecological foundations. New technologies fascinated her, but something about this realm of the dead exuded a horror that even Rogachev’s less than squeamish industrial nature seemed to be developing antibodies against.

Hanna’s tracks veered off in a wide arc. The huge imprints suggested that he had been forced to dodge one of the mining machines. The crater-like tracks were joined by some of lesser diameter, and less deep too. Evelyn looked behind and saw a beetle shimmering in its cocoon of dust like a mirage. She couldn’t make out the spider-like creature any more. She closed her eyes, and the image of the colossal machine left a ghostly afterglow on her retinas.

The beetle was eating.

It worked its way unceasingly through the undergrowth with its shovel-like jaw, loosening the rocks, sieving out the indigestible fragments and guiding the finegrained matter that remained into its glowing insides. Meanwhile, huge reflectors atop its hunchback followed the course of the sun, bundled photons and sent them off to smaller parabolic reflectors. From there, the light made its way into the cybernetic organism and created a burning hell of 1000 degrees Celsius, not enough to melt the regolith, but enough to divest it of its bound elements. Hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen and minute quantities of helium-3 rose in gas form into the solar oven, and from there made their way into the highly compressed counter-world of its abdomen. At minus 260 degrees Celsius and under enormous pressure, the obtained gases condensed into liquid and were then transmitted to batteries of spherical tanks, separated according to their elementary affiliation: minute amounts of helium-3, every drop a carefully protected treasure, and everything else in huge quantities. Despite the potential value of the hydrogen for fuel production, the nitrogen for the enrichment of air supplies and the carbon for building materials, vast as the beetle was, it still had to release most of these liquefied elements back into the vacuum, where they instantly evaporated, forming a fleeting, cyclically renewed atmosphere around the machine. In this way the beetles altered everything surrounding them: the lunar soil, which they regurgitated in the form of baked crumbs, and the vacuum, which was constantly enriched with the noble gases that the machine constantly expelled.

As a result of the gas emissions, the dust around the machine became even denser. Strictly speaking, given that there were no air molecules to hold the floating pieces of rock in suspension, they should have been incapable of forming the kilometre-high barrier. But it was the very lack of atmospheric pressure, as well as the scant gravity and electrostatic phenomena, that caused their extremely long and high flight-paths, from which they sank down, as if reluctantly, hours later. So, over time, a permanent haze had descended over the mining zone. The clouds produced by the beetle under high pressure formed additional dust in such large quantities that the chewing apparatus and insect legs completely disappeared behind it at times. In addition to this, there was an iridescent gleam on the crystalline structure of the suspended matter, almost like aurora, which made it even harder to see.

This was exactly what happened to Hanna on his solitary trek; the reason why he only became aware of the proximity of one of the mining machines crossing his path once its shovel had practically swallowed him up and passed him through the sieve – only a jump of possibly record-breaking proportions had saved him from being industrially processed. He hastily put some distance between himself and the beetle, aghast that he’d overlooked something so colossal that it could make the ground shake. The machine had towered above him, but it was a well-known fact that small creatures tended to be blinded when they got too close to large ones. He aligned his course to the path of the machine and carried on. From the inexhaustible information provided as part of the conspiracy, he knew that the beetles ploughed the regolith in rectangular paths on the imaginary line between Cape Heraclides and Cape Laplace, and that you couldn’t miss the station as long as you kept at a ninety-degree angle to the pasture routes – the only orientation device in a world where, due to the lack of a magnetic field, even compasses didn’t work. He had been on the go for well over an hour now since the buggy had served its last, and his long, springing steps had necessitated his breaking into his first oxygen reserves. But he still didn’t feel any sign of fatigue. As long as nothing unexpected happened, the mining station should appear before him in the next fifteen to twenty minutes. If not, he would be in serious difficulties, and there would be plenty of time to worry then.

Totally unexpectedly, they met a spider.

It emerged from the shadow of a beetle and crossed their path with such speed that Julian had to whip the steering wheel around to stop them from colliding with it. For a moment, Evelyn was reminded of H. G. Wells’ tripods, the machines from Mars in War of the Worlds which attacked entire cities using heat rays, burning them to cinders. But this thing had eight legs instead of three, daddy-long-legs-thin and several metres long, making it look as if its body were hovering in space. There were dozens of spherical tanks lined up right behind its pincers. Another thing that set the spider apart from its Martian colleagues was its complete lack of interest in human presence. Without Julian’s quick-wittedness, Evelyn suspected it would simply have run right over the vehicle.

‘What in God’s name was that brute of a thing?’ shrieked Momoka.

She was communicating again now, although admittedly in a way which was provoking wistful memories of her silence. Any trace of grief seemed to have been transformed into rage. Evelyn suddenly wondered whether Momoka’s joyless personality was less shaped by arrogance than by pent-up aggression, hoarded over many years, and she became less and less happy about her driving the rover. Her heart racing, she stared after the robot as it hurried away. In front of them, Julian slowly began to drive forwards again.

‘A spider,’ he said, as if there had been any doubt on the matter. ‘Loading and unloading robots. They receive the full tanks from the beetles, exchange them for empty ones, bring the loot to the station and load them up to be transported on.’

‘I don’t exactly feel welcome here,’ observed Rogachev.

‘They won’t hurt you,’ murmured Amber. ‘They just want to play.’

‘Is the area under surveillance?’

‘Yes and no.’

‘Which means?’

‘The CCTV only switches on if there’s an error message. As I said, the mining is automated. Distributed intelligence in a real-time network. The robots only react to each other; we don’t exist in their internal image.’

‘Pieces of shit!’ snarled Momoka. ‘Your goddamn Moon is starting to really get on my tits.’

‘Maybe it would be worth enriching their internal image with some additional data,’ Evelyn suggested. ‘I mean, if a spider has room in its reality cosmos for something as space-consuming as a beetle, surely it can’t be that complicated to squeeze in Homo sapiens too.’

‘Humans aren’t supposed be in the mining zone,’ said Julian, a little on edge. ‘The zone is a self-enclosed technosphere.’

‘And how big is this technosphere?’

‘At the moment, one hundred square kilometres. On the American side. The Chinese occupy a smaller zone.’

‘And you’re sure that those are American machines?’

‘The Chinese use caterpillar tracks.’

‘Well’ said Evelyn, ‘at least we won’t get trampled by the enemy.’

From that point on, they paid even more attention to what was lurking in the shadows, and – because it was impossible to hear anything in a vacuum – also strained their eyes until they hurt. That’s how Amber noticed the buggy, even from a distance.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Momoka as she saw Julian stop.

‘Carl might be up ahead.’

‘Oh, that’s good.’ She laughed drily. ‘Very good! For me, not for him.’ She tried to overtake Julian but Rogachev put his hand on her forearm.

‘Wait.’

‘What for, for God’s sake?’

‘I said, wait.’

His unusually authoritative tone made Momoka stop. Rogachev pulled himself up. There were no spiders nor beetles as far as the eye could see. The baked regolith was the only indication that the mining machines had already processed this part of the Sinus Iridum. Amidst the bleak landscape, Hanna’s buggy looked like the remains of a long-lost battle.

‘I can’t see him anywhere,’ said Amber after a while.

‘No.’ Rogachev turned his upper body round and back. ‘It really doesn’t look like he’s there.’

‘How could you tell in all this fucking dust?’ growled Momoka. ‘He could be anywhere.’

‘I don’t know, Momoka. All I know is that – so far – we haven’t been shot at.’

There was expectant silence for a while.

‘Okay,’ Julian decided. ‘Let’s go over there.’

Within a few minutes it became clear that Hanna wasn’t lying in wait for them somewhere. His buggy had succumbed to an axle fracture. Bootprints led off in a straight line away from it.

‘He set off on foot,’ commented Amber.

‘Will he be able to make it?’ asked Evelyn.

‘Sure, as long as he has enough air.’ Julian bent over the cargo area. ‘He hasn’t left anything behind in any case, and I know for sure that he took oxygen reserves from the Ganymede with him.’

‘Shouldn’t we be there soon?’ Evelyn stared into the distance. ‘I mean, we’ve been on the go for over an hour now.’

‘According to the rover it’s another fifteen kilometres to the station.’

‘A piece of cake then, really.’

‘For us, but not so much for him.’ Julian straightened up. ‘He’ll need one to two hours from here. That means he’s still out there somewhere. There’s no way he’s already reached the station.’

‘So we’ll run into him.’

‘And soon, I think.’

‘And what will we do with him when we do?’

‘The question’s more what he’ll do with us,’ snorted Amber.

‘Well, I know what I’m going to do with him,’ hissed Momoka. ‘I’m going to—’

‘No, you won’t,’ Julian interrupted her. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Momoka. We’re grieving with you, but—’

‘Oh, spare me that shit!’

‘But we have to find out what Carl is planning. I want to know what this is all about. We need him alive!’

‘That won’t be easy,’ said Rogachev. ‘He’s armed.’

‘Do you have any ideas?’

‘Well.’ Rogachev was silent for a moment. ‘We’ve got the advantage in some ways. We have the rovers. And we’re approaching him from behind. If he doesn’t happen to turn round right at the decisive moment, then we could drive right up without him even realising.’

‘And do you want to risk him shooting at us as soon as he does realise?’ Amber turned round. ‘Driving right up close is all well and good. But what then?’

‘We could surround him,’ Julian mused. ‘Approach from both sides.’

‘Then he’d definitely see us,’ said Rogachev.

‘How about a friendly ramming?’ Evelyn suggested.

‘Hmm, not bad.’ Julian thought for a moment. ‘Let’s say we drive next to one another, nice and slow. Then one of us can run him down from behind, and then, before he has time to react, the ones in the other rover can jump down and grab his weapons, and so on.’

‘And so on. So who’s doing the ramming?’

‘Julian,’ said Rogachev. ‘And we’ll form the attack commando.’

‘And who’s driving?’

‘Well…’ Rogachev turned to Momoka, who was standing there motionless as if waiting for someone to activate her vital functions. ‘Momoka is very emotionally charged right now.’

‘Don’t you worry about me,’ said Momoka tonelessly.

‘But I do,’ said Rogachev coolly. ‘I don’t know whether we can let you drive. You’ll mess things up.’

‘And?’ Momoka broke out of her frozen state and climbed back into the driver’s seat. ‘What’s the alternative, Oleg? If you let me jump on him you’ll be risking much more. For example, the fact that I’ll smash in his visor with the nearest available rock.’

‘We need him alive,’ Julian repeated insistently. ‘Under no circumstances will we—’

‘I got it!’ she snapped.

‘No vigilantes, Momoka!’

‘I’ll play by the rules. We’ll do it the way you just said.’

‘Sure?’

Momoka sighed. When she spoke, her voice trembled as if she was holding back tears. ‘Yes, I’m sure. I promise.’

‘I don’t trust you,’ said Rogachev after a while.

‘You don’t?’

‘No. I think you’ll put us all in danger. But it’s your decision, Julian. If you want to let her drive – then go ahead.’

Hanna saw the mining machine approaching from the left. Dust billowed out around its legs and shovel wheels, while freezing clouds forced their way out of its sides and mixed with the suspended matter to form a hazy camouflage. He tried to estimate whether he could safely cross in front of it. It was pretty close already, but if he stepped up his pace he should be able to manage it.

On Earth, he thought to himself, that thing would create a hell of a racket. Here, it approached with malicious silence. The only thing he could hear was the whoosh of the air-conditioning system in his suit and his own disciplined breathing. He knew that silence nourished foolishness, and that – especially in the glistening haze – correct estimations of distance were hardly possible, but on the other hand he didn’t feel the slightest inclination to wait until the monstrous thing had crawled by. The mining station had to be really close by now. He’d had enough now, he just wanted to get there.

Clasping the last of the survival backpacks tightly under his arm, he sprinted off.

‘I see him!’

The Canadian’s blurred silhouette had appeared on the horizon. He was sprinting over the plain with long springing jumps, while the colossal body of a mining machine was approaching from the left. Julian waved Momoka’s rover over next to his and waited until they were alongside each other.

‘He’s taking quite a risk there,’ whispered Amber.

‘And rather an inconvenient one, for us,’ grumbled Rogachev. ‘The beetle is already quite close. Should we really risk it?’

‘I don’t know.’ Julian hesitated. ‘If we let the machine pass it could take ages.’

‘We could drive around it,’ suggested Evelyn.

‘And then what?’

‘Approach him from the other side.’

‘No, then he’ll see us. Our only chance of taking him by surprise is if we stay behind.’

‘Then let’s go,’ hissed Momoka. ‘If he can get through ahead of the beetle, then so can we.’

‘The machine really is very close, Momoka,’ said Rogachev insistently. ‘Shouldn’t we wait? I mean, it’s not like Carl can give us the slip.’

‘Unless he’s seen us,’ Evelyn pondered.

‘Then he would have shot at us.’

‘Perhaps he’s trying to throw us off.’

‘Not Carl. He’s a professional. I know people like him – none of them would think twice about shooting in his situation.’ Rogachev paused. ‘Nor would I, for that matter.’

The rovers were approaching the fleeing figure at a steady speed. At the same time, the beetle was getting closer and closer to Hanna, who was now running even faster. The stomping choreography of the six powerful insect legs was only vaguely outlined in the dust. The Canadian looked like vermin in front of the monstrosity, but he seemed to have estimated his chances accurately.

‘He’s going to get through,’ whispered Momoka.

‘And then some,’ said Amber. ‘Oleg’s right, he can’t slip through our fingers. We should wait.’

‘Nonsense! We’ll make it.’

‘But why would we take a risk, and especially now? We have his footprints.’

‘The beetle will erase them.’

‘So far we’ve found them again every time.’

‘Momoka,’ said Rogachev in a dangerously quiet tone, ‘you promised—’

‘End of discussion,’ decided Julian. ‘We’ll wait.’

‘No!’

Momoka’s rover jerked as she pressed down on the pedal. Regolith sprayed up on all sides. Rogachev, who had almost straightened himself up, lost his grip, was hurled out of the vehicle and landed in the dust. The vehicle swerved for a moment, then thrashed forwards.

‘You piece of shit!’ she screamed. ‘You miserable—’

‘Momoka, no!’

‘Come back!’

Paying no attention to their cries, Momoka sped the rover forwards after the running figure. Evelyn held tightly to the back seat but was thrown backwards, hearing Rogachev utter a string of sonorous Russian swearwords. They shot off towards Hanna at top speed. In a matter of seconds he would be killed by the force of the collision.

‘Momoka, stop! We need him—’

At that moment, the Canadian turned round.

Hanna believed neither in intuition nor in some higher inspiration. As far as he remembered, none of his colleagues who had trusted their gut, so to speak, had survived very long. The regulatory authority of the intellect commanded the use of careful thought to compensate for the lack of eyes in the back of one’s head; anything else was pure chance, although looking behind him at that one, decisive moment turned out to be pretty useful too.

He saw the rover shooting towards him.

Assessment of the situation: a design he was familiar with from the Schröter space station, so they had clearly made it from Aristarchus to here. He and the vehicle, tangential to the marching direction of the beetle. Time until the mining machine arrives: unknown. Time until the collision with the rover: three seconds. Pulling out weapon and firing: pointless. Two seconds. One second—

He threw himself to the side.

Rolling away, he got back onto his feet and found himself dangerously close to the beetle. Tonnes of regolith were spraying up high in front of his eyes. Behind it gaped the cloud-covered, jagged mouth of a gigantic shovel, filled to the brim and rising up from the ground, followed by another, another, another. The mining wheel was turning at an incredible speed, hovering from left to right in the process, transporting more and more masses of lunar rock into the sieve and onto the conveyor belt. The beetle took a step forward, stomping powerfully, making the ground shake.

Where was the rover?

Hanna whipped around. He saw his spare backpack lying on the ground a short distance away; it had slipped from him when he fell. He needed the oxygen reserves, but the vehicle had already turned in a fountain of dust and was speeding over to him again, and now there was a second rover too, approaching from the opposite side. His hand moved up to his thigh, tearing the weapon with the explosive bullets from its case.

‘I knew it!’ cursed Rogachev. ‘I knew it!’

He had clambered onto the seat behind Julian as Hanna flew through the air, had seen him thud down and get back up again. The Canadian produced a long and thin object, clearly undecided as to which of the two vehicles he should target. The second of hesitation sealed his fate. Momoka’s rover caught him on the shoulder with one of its man-size wheels. He flew a considerable distance, landed on his side and rolled over towards the walking factory, directly towards the rotating shovel, which was approaching at a worryingly fast pace.

‘Enough, Momoka,’ screamed Julian. ‘Let us get the bastard.’

But it seemed the Japanese woman was suffering from sudden deafness. Even while Hanna was still pulling himself up, visibly dazed, she jerked the steering wheel around once again, forced the vehicle into too sharp a turn and lost control. This time, everything went wrong. The vehicle became airborne, overturned several times in a row and ploughed through the spraying rocks towards the beetle. Momoka was hurled out and slid through the rubble with her arms and legs spreadeagled, screaming like a banshee. She jumped up and rushed on, seemingly uninjured, and went straight for Hanna. Horrified, Amber watched as the rover came to a halt with its wheels still in the air, a blanket of dust sinking down on it.

‘My God, Evelyn,’ she groaned. ‘Evelyn!’

Evelyn’s only thought was to grip on to the strutting of the seat as tightly as she could. Unable to scream, she tried to picture the vehicle as a beetle, within which she would be protected as long as she managed not to lose her grip. Momoka had disappeared. There was no up or down any more, only bumps and dust and more bumps, smashing the chassis to pieces. Finally, she did let go. She fell to the ground and stared up at a wheel wobbling above her.

The rover had come to a halt, and she was alive. So far.

She immediately tried to free herself from the wreck, but she was stuck. But where? Her arms were free. She kicked her legs forcefully, and she could move them too, but the pile of junk still didn’t want to let her go. The ground shuddered as something colossal rammed into the regolith, right next to her, and with icy clarity she realised what it was.

‘Evelyn!’ Amber. ‘Evelyn!’

‘I’m stuck,’ she screamed. ‘I’m stuck!’

The ground trembled again.

The robots only react to one another; we’re not present in their internal image.

She had to get out of here! As fast as she could!

She began to pull wildly at the frame, scared out of her wits, but it was as if she were rooted to it, as if her back were soldered to the rover. She began to howl like a wolf in a trap, because she knew she would die.

Julian brought his rover to a standstill right next to the wreckage. He didn’t care in the slightest what Hanna and Momoka were doing. The two of them had disappeared on the other side of the mining machine, away from the gluttonous shovelling.

They had to get Evelyn out of there.

Rogachev and Amber jumped from their seats and hurried over to the wrecked vehicle. Evelyn stretched her arm out towards them. It wasn’t hard to see that her backpack had wedged itself into the grotesquely twisted strutting and was alarmingly stuck. Julian, overcome with worry, dared to glance up. The colossal body of the machine was making its way unrelentingly forward, darkening the sky, bathing the plain, people and vehicles in its ravine-like shadow. The strutting of its armoured plates was visible only in silhouette: rivets, seams and bolts, the trichina mechanism of the pipes. The insectoid curve of the skull with its chewing apparatus, sieves and mining belts swayed slowly back and forth, as if the thing were picking up their scent. Conically formed hip joints sprang out from angled legs, each around ten metres high, multiple-jointed and as thick as the crossbeams of a building crane.

The crashed rover lay directly in its path.

At that moment, in a way that was more perceptible than it was visible, the leg right at the front of its body lethargically began to rise.

Hanna struggled to get his bearings.

He had hit the back of his head on the inner casing of his helmet, something which should have been practically impossible, because the head covering was supposed to be large enough to prevent such accidents. His skull and neck hurt, and his shoulder too had seen better days, but at least the armour seemed to have absorbed some of the collision. He could move his arms still, but the weapon with the explosive bullets had fallen from his hand.

He couldn’t lose his weapon!

Red and yellow circles were rotating in front of his eyes, trying to suck away his consciousness. Half blinded, he stumbled a few steps forwards, fell on his knees, then shook his head and fought against a strong wave of nausea.

Momoka was just a few steps behind him.

She rushed along, fuelled by hate. Like Medea, Electra, Nemesis, she was the incarnation of vengeance, unchecked by reason, without fear, without any plan. All thought processes were brought to a standstill; her thoughts were ruled purely by the idea of killing Hanna, and she didn’t care how.

Something on the ground caught her gaze.

Something long and light in colour. It reminded her of a gun, but there was no trigger, just some buttons.

It was a gun.

Hanna’s gun!

‘Try to push the strap down.’

‘Which strap, dammit?’

‘There, that one! Strap, bar, whatever it is!’

Whatever it was, thought Amber, before the rover had been transformed into a pile of debris. A piece of the shaft? The mount from a radio receiver? She pushed against it with all her might while Rogachev pulled at the back of Chambers’ seat. A part of it had wedged itself between the backpack and her suit and was refusing to budge.

‘Hurry!’ shouted Julian.

Rogachev kicked against the backrest with his boot. It gave a little, but the real problem was the twisted bar. Amber looked up and saw the mining machine’s foot rising higher and higher, like something out of a nightmare.

‘Again, Oleg,’ she pleaded. ‘Kick it again.’

The foot was now hovering above their heads. Wheelbarrow-sized loads of dust and small stones hailed down on them. Rogachev cursed again in Russian, which Amber interpreted as a bad sign. She pushed herself against the strap once more, burrowing the tips of her boots into the ground, tensing her muscles, and suddenly the entire thing broke right through the middle. Rogachev grabbed it, pulled the released backrest out from under the backpack and hurled it away.

‘I’ll make it by myself from here!’

In a flash, Evelyn pulled herself out of the rubble and jumped up. They ran away just as the beetle’s leg was making its descent, throwing themselves onto the back seat of Julian’s rover. At the very moment when he drove away, the monstrous foot crashed down onto the wreck and crunched it with such force that their getaway car was jolted into the air for a second.

‘Where to now?’ called Julian.

Amber pointed into the dust. ‘The other side. They must be on the other side of the machine!’

What a discovery! Momoka bent over, clasped the unexpected instrument of her vengeance and went after Hanna, who had pulled himself to his feet and was staggering away like a drunkard. It had become significantly darker and a hazy shadow had descended on them, but Momoka paid no attention to it. She made a leap and kicked out at the Canadian, knocking him off his feet once again.

Hanna rolled onto his stomach.

No, don’t shoot yet, she told herself. She wanted him to be watching her as she did it. To look at her as he died! Breathless, she waited until he had rolled over, then pointed the weapon at his helmet.

‘You piece of shit!’

She pressed one of the buttons. Then another.

‘Do you see this? Do you see it, you piece of shit?’

Nothing. How did you shoot this thing? Oh, it must be here, a safety measure: the detonator was protected by a shield, so she just had to push it up with her thumb, and then—

Hanna crawled backwards, staring at the armoured, faceless figure in disbelief. It could only be her. He would have credited Rogachev with the same fighting spirit, but this person was small and petite, unmistakably Momoka Omura, and she was ready to make him pay for Warren Locatelli’s death. She had discovered the safety shield. She was pushing it up. He had no chance of grabbing the weapon in time. He had to get away, put distance between himself and the Japanese woman. Was she screaming at him? Momoka was locked on to a different frequency, but he was certain she was screaming at him, and suddenly he felt unfairly treated. I didn’t kill your husband, he wanted to say, as if that would have changed anything, but he hadn’t killed him, instead he had wanted to spare him and make his death less painful, and now he was going to be punished for that?

His gaze wandered to a point high above her.

Oh God!

Distance! He had to get away!

‘Through the legs,’ called Amber.

‘Are you crazy?’ Julian was driving alongside the mining machine at high speed. ‘Was that not enough for you just then?’

She leaned back and stared up at the giant. Julian was right. It was too dangerous. It was only now, right next to it, that she appreciated how huge the beetle really was. A walking mountain. Each one of its six legs could end her existence with just one blow. The highest concentration of dust was beneath the torso, visibility was nonexistent, and to top it all off, extensive white clouds were breaking out of openings along the torso seam and spreading out rapidly. They made it past the machine and drove around its rear end, from which avalanches of baked regolith were hailing out. They dodged the rain of debris and drove back along the other side.

Back to the monster’s head.

Momoka wanted to relish the moment as long as she could, so she didn’t press immediately, but instead watched as Hanna crawled away, as if there were still the ghost of a chance he could get away from her. Ha! As if there were even the slightest cause to hope that she would change her mind.

‘Scared?’ she hissed.

He should be scared. Just like Warren had been scared. We need him alive, she heard Julian bleating in her mind, that shitty, stupid arsehole who had lured them here, to the bloody Moon, her and Warren. Alive? Fuck you, Julian! She needed him dead! And she would kill him, now, as he pulled himself to his feet. Sayonara, Carl Hanna. A good moment.

She could barely see.

It was darkening rapidly. What was happening? She leaned back and looked up. Unbelievable! Fucking Moon! This Moon was really starting to get on her—

‘Tits,’ she whispered.

A huge black stomper of a foot hung in the air above her.

Then it came down.

The beetle ended Momoka’s life without giving her the opportunity for inner reflection, something that wouldn’t have suited her character anyway. Instead, in honour of her temperament and her belief that people should die as they lived, she exploded one last time: in the course of her physical compression, Hanna’s weapon smashed against the breastplate of her spacesuit and one of the bullets broke in half. A chemical union occurred between shower gel and shampoo. The projectile flew apart, and the nine remaining ones blew up with it, blasting the beetle’s foot clean away.

This time, an error message was sent to the control centre of the moon base. It informed the crew about material damage to the front left walking apparatus of BUG-24, signifying that the machine was in danger of failure and had to shut itself down, which it did that very moment. It stopped all activity directly after the explosion, but that was of no help. The beetle’s amputation was complete. Overloaded by the loss of the front leg, the middle one buckled too, and the colossal machine began to tilt.

Tits. That was the last word they had heard from Momoka.

‘I can’t see her,’ said Amber.

And how could we, in all this dust? thought Evelyn. Her entire body was still shaking. She was reliving the moment in her mind again and again, the moment when she had almost been trampled, a true groundhog day of a thought, splintering off into an eerie alternate reality crowned by the notion that she would wake up the next moment and find she had only dreamed her escape, and the steel foot would—

Steel foot?

Evelyn looked more closely. Something about the beetle was nagging at her. Was she hallucinating? Had they got closer to the machine, or had the machine got closer to them?

Then she saw that one of the beetle’s legs was breaking away.

‘It’s tipping over,’ she stammered.

‘What?’

‘It’s tipping over!’ Evelyn began to shout. ‘It’s tipping over! The machine’s tipping over. It’s tipping over!’

In a second, they were all shouting over one another. The powerful body had unmistakably lost its balance and was indeed beginning to tip over. Fatally, it was tipping in the wrong direction.

In their direction.

Julian changed course, trying to get power out of the rover that it just didn’t possess. On their way from Aristarchus, eighty kilometres per hour had often seemed unreasonably fast to them, when the vehicle, despite being restricted by its weight and lack of traction, had completed the most adventurous leaps and jumps. Now Evelyn felt they were crawling along at a snail’s pace. She looked behind them and saw the machine struggling to balance. For one blessed moment it seemed as if the giant had stabilised again, but it was beyond hope. Although the rear leg held up to the weight at first, it soon started to sway back and forth.

Then it collapsed.

The monster’s torso crashed down into the regolith in a spring tide of dust, and the immense abdomen tipped towards them.

‘What’s that?’ screamed Amber at the same moment.

It took Evelyn a moment to realise that her agitation wasn’t caused by the machine, but by something else that was rushing towards them from the opposite direction.

‘Swerve! Swerve!’

‘I can’t swerve!’

While the beetle continued to fall at an ever greater speed, they found themselves confronted with a spider that had appeared out of nowhere, whose internal world clearly failed to recognise not only humans, but falling mining machines too. The loading robot hurried purposefully towards the collapsing giant, seemingly intent on cutting off their path. Julian jerked the steering wheel to the left, and the robot changed its course too.

‘Right! Right!’

The ground shook. A shock-wave gripped the rover and submerged the world in cold grey. The vehicle skidded, then began to turn on its own axis, knocking one of the spider’s filigree legs off. The spider began to stagger. Travelling backwards, Evelyn saw the mining machine go down, a collapsing mountain in a hurricane of whirling regolith. The rover took a hit, came to an abrupt halt and tipped over. High above them, the spider went into a frenzy, teetering around aimlessly on its long legs.

‘Get out!’ screamed Rogachev.

They jumped out of their seats, fell, stumbled, and ran for their lives. New clouds shot over and wrapped around them, carrying them off. A huge parabolic reflector spun towards Evelyn, rotating like the blade of an oversized buzz saw. It hacked into the ground not even an arm’s length away from her and disappeared, rolling into the pyroclastic greyness. The beetle had gone down completely, missing her by a hair’s breadth and catching the injured spider instead. With its pincers flailing wildly, it went into an arabesque, lost its grip and collapsed feebly, directly above the rover. Its torso crashed into the steering wheel and seats, then bounced up one more time, rotated and released helium-3 tanks in all directions, aggressive, hopping spherical things which began to hunt down the fleeing people.

Evelyn ran.

And so did Hanna.

At the moment when the beetle’s leg came down on Momoka, he knew what catastrophe was about to unfold. The mining machine’s motion apparatus looked incredibly stable, but ten simultaneously fired detonating caps were designed to rip even the most stable of structures to shreds. Hanna had no intention of waiting to see whether the remaining legs would compensate for the loss. He hadn’t gone far by the time the collision shook the ground and gave him his answer. All around him, a layer of the finest powder flew up. He ran on without stopping. It was only after a while that he forced himself to pause, wheezing, with a painful head and throbbing shoulder. He gave himself a shake and looked back at the scene of the disaster. Grey clouds were forming some distance away. He should have still been able to see the bold silhouette of the machine from here. He took its disappearance as an indication that it really had crashed down. With any luck it had caused havoc amongst his pursuers – a vague prospect, he had to admit.

What else could go wrong? What in God’s name was he doing wrong?

He wasn’t doing anything wrong. The circumstances were what they were. He had learned a long time ago how it felt to be in the pinball machine of circumstance. To be relentlessly pinged around in it, however clever one saw oneself to be. It was so much harder to gain control over oneself than it was to take it away from others. Plans were constructs, well thought out straight lines. On the drawing board, they functioned excellently. In practice, though, it was about not going off course along the winding road of chance. He knew all of that, so why was he getting worked up?

Fine, so the worst possible scenario was that, apart from Momoka, they had all made it through. He thought he remembered having seen her rover in a crash, but supposing they had managed to heave it onto its wheels again, they still had two vehicles. He, on the other hand, was on foot and robbed of his explosives. Status: critical!

He moved his arm cautiously, stretching it out and bending it. Nothing was broken, nothing dislocated. It was possible that he was concussed. Apart from that, though, he was fine, and he still had the two pistols with conventional bullets, which admittedly made smaller holes, but were just as deadly.

Which direction had he run in? His head-over-heels flight had brought him into uncharted territory. That was bad. Without the beetle tracks, he could end up missing the station. His own tracks were sure to be visible over the not-yet-processed ground, but then the rover hadn’t turned up yet. They might be looking for Momoka, but could they risk letting him get away for her sake? If they really did still have both the rovers, then wouldn’t one of them have started hunting him down by now?

Maybe things weren’t that bad after all. Strengthened by confidence, he turned his attention to working out where he was.

They struggled up one by one, clumsy, dazed, their white spacesuits dirty, as though they were clambering out of their own graves. All around them, it looked like the scene after a bomb attack or a natural catastrophe. The hunchback of the mining machine, still towering up into the skies, now a massif in the regolith. The snapped spider limbs of the loading robot. Their smashed rover. And over everything, a ghost of swirling dust.

‘Momoka?’

They called her name unrelentingly, wandering around in search, but received no answer, nor did they find any trace of her. Momoka seemed to have been swallowed up by the dust, and suddenly Evelyn couldn’t even see the others any more. She stopped. Shuddered as something cold touched her deep within. The dust around her billowed out, forming a kind of tunnel. On the other side it seemed different in nature, darker, more threatening, and at the same time more inviting, and all of a sudden it seemed to Evelyn that she was seeing herself disappear in the tunnel, and with every step that she took away from herself, her silhouette swirled beyond recognition, until she lost herself. An indefinable amount of time later, she found the others on the other side.

‘Where were you?’ asked Julian, concerned. ‘We were calling you the whole time.’

Where had she been? At a border, a border to forgetting. She had glanced momentarily into the shadows; that’s how it had seemed to her at least, as if something were tugging and sucking at her, using its dark temptations to try to make her surrender. She knew about the irrationality of perception. Borderline experiences had been the subject of esoteric debate on her programmes more than once, without she herself having any perception of the other side, but in the moment when Amber, Oleg and Julian turned up by her side again, she had known that Momoka Omura was dead. The silence that met their calls was the silence of death. The only thing they found was tracks, which led away from the head of the beetle and which could only be Hanna’s.

But Momoka had disappeared without a trace.

In the moments that followed, Evelyn didn’t say a word about her unusual experience. After a short time they gave up the search and went back to the rover. It was no longer functional, but at least they managed to salvage their oxygen supplies. For the first time since they had been on Hanna’s trail, it looked as though his tracks were going to lead them the wrong way.

They weighed up their options.

In the end, they decided to keep following him.