Limit

London, Great Britain

The address 85 Vauxhall Cross, in the south-west of the city, on Albert Embankment near Vauxhall Bridge, looked as if King Nebuchadnezzar II had tried to build a Babylonian ziggurat with Lego bricks. In fact, the sand-coloured hulk with the green armoured glass surfaces contained the beating heart of British security, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as SIS or MI6. In spite of its playful appearance, it was a genuine bulwark against the enemies of the United Kingdom, last attacked by an IRA unit twenty-five years ago, when a missile had been fired at it from the opposite bank, although without doing much more than shake the cups and saucers in the Secret Service coffee lounge.

Jennifer Shaw was on her way to her son’s birthday dinner when she received a call from a very senior authority. She switched to receive, and C’s voice filled the leather-scented interior of her freshly restored Jaguar Mark 2. In most people’s eyes, the head of the British Foreign Secret Service was, after thirty-one James Bond films, called M, which was quite close to the reality, except that Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the legendary first director, had introduced the letter C, and since then all directors had been called C – not least because it happened to stand for ‘control’.

‘Hello, Bernard,’ said Shaw, in the certain knowledge that her evening was stuffed.

‘Jennifer. I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

A set phrase. Bernard Lee, the current director, couldn’t have cared less if he was disturbing her, or how. The only disturbance that he would have acknowledged was the disturbance to national security.

‘I’m on my way to Bibendum,’ she said truthfully.

‘Oh, always excellent. Especially the skate wing. I haven’t been there for ages. Could you call in on me for a moment beforehand?’

‘How long’s a moment?’

‘Only if you have time. On the other hand—’

‘The traffic’s not too bad. Give me ten minutes.’

‘Thanks.’

She called her son from her mobile and told him to go ahead and order a starter without her, but to get her a double portion of the iced lime soufflé.

‘Which means that I won’t see you before pudding,’ her son complained.

‘I’ll aim to be there for the main.’

‘Has this got anything to do with Orley’s moon trip?’

‘No idea, darling.’

‘I thought the bomb went off and didn’t do any harm, and they were all coming home safe and sound.’

‘I don’t really know.’

‘Oh, well. I guess the Prime Minister’s kids see their mother even more rarely.’

‘How nice to have brought positive-thinking people into the world. Don’t be cross with me, sweetie, I’ll call as soon as I can.’

At Wellington Arch she turned from Piccadilly into Grosvenor Place and followed Vauxhall Bridge Road over the Thames. Soon she was sitting in full evening dress in Lee’s office, with a glass of water in front of her.

‘We’ve reconstructed Norrington’s deleted emails,’ the director said without any preamble.

‘And?’ she asked excitedly.

‘Well.’ Lee pursed his lips. ‘You know, all the clues pointed to him, but we didn’t have any real evidence—’

‘The fact that Kenny Xin shot him full in the face seems pretty convincing to me. Have you found any trace of Xin, by the way?’

‘Not the slightest. But we have come across something alarming. Our American colleagues are worried too. Norrington’s mails didn’t make any sense at all at first, he had deleted nothing but white noise, so we tried it with the Hydra program. And suddenly we had a complex correspondence in front of our eyes. Unfortunately there’s nothing to tell us who Hydra is, and it isn’t clear who else received the messages. What is certain is that Norrington must have had access to a secret router, to which he sent encrypted emails.’

‘All from the central computer of the Big O?’

‘Definitely. Without the mask, that snake-headed icon, we can’t do a thing with the emails. It wouldn’t have occurred to anybody that they are encoded, and he was too clever to install the decoding program on his work computer, and instead carried it around with him on a memory stick. However, we’re getting some insights into the planning and construction of the launching pad in Equatorial Guinea, and learning some amazing things about the black market in Korean atom bombs, things that even we weren’t aware of. Okay, the bomb went off, as we know, without doing any damage.’

‘Indirectly it caused a lot of damage,’ said Jennifer. ‘But okay, Julian, Lynn and most of the guests are on the way home. They should be at OSS in a few hours.’

‘You see; and now it’s imperative that you talk to Julian.’

‘Will do.’

‘As soon as possible, I mean. Within the next hour. I need his assessment.’

Shaw raised an eyebrow. ‘About what?’

‘According to Norrington’s correspondence, the whole business isn’t quite over yet.’

‘Tell me quite clearly. I have to know that it’s worth leaving my son to celebrate his thirtieth birthday without his mummy.’

Lee nodded. ‘I think it’s worth it, Jennifer. Last year, there wasn’t just one mini-nuke sent to the Moon.’ He paused, sipped on his water and set the glass down carefully in front of him. ‘There were two.’

‘Two,’ echoed Jennifer.

‘Yes. Kenny Xin bought two, and both were put on Mayé’s rocket. And now we’re asking ourselves: where’s the second one?’

Shaw stared at him. Lee was right, this was alarming. This meant no lime soufflé. What it did mean, she didn’t want to think about.

Charon, Outer Space

Evelyn Chambers saw Olympiada Rogacheva floating from the sleeping area into the lounge with an expression of grim contentment. The spookily unreal aspect of her appearance had vanished. For the first time, the Russian seemed to see herself as the chief indicator of her own presence, as someone who didn’t only exist thanks to her association with other people, but who would continue to be there even if her life’s coordinators took their eyes off her.

‘I told him to kiss my ass,’ she announced, and settled next to Heidrun.

‘And how did he take that?’

‘He said he wouldn’t do that, exactly, but he wished me luck.’

‘Seriously,’ said Heidrun, amazed. ‘You told him you were leaving him?’

Olympiada Rogacheva looked down at herself with the shy sensuality of a teenager exploring the new territory of her body.

‘Do you think I’m too old to—’

‘Nonsense,’ Heidrun said stoutly.

Olympiada smiled, looked up and floated away. An imaginary Miranda Winter somersaulted weightlessly, shrieked and squeaked. Finn O’Keefe read his book, to keep from seeing her red lips forming a blossom of promise, or uttering words of breathtaking banality. They were hurrying through space in the constant presence of Rebecca Hsu, they heard Momoka Omura making her acid comments, and Warren Locatelli boasting, Chucky telling bad jokes even more badly than they deserved, Aileen making bouquets of brightly coloured flowers of wisdom, Mimi Parker and Marc Edwards finding fulfilment in togetherness and Peter Black telling the latest news from time and space. They even heard Carl Hanna playing guitar, the other Carl, who wasn’t a terrorist, just a nice guy. Walo Ögi played chess under the ceiling and lost his third game against Karla Kramp, Eva Borelius was trapped in the hamster-wheel of her self-reproach, and Dana Lawrence, the self-declared heroine, was writing a report.

Evelyn Chambers said nothing, glad of the emptiness in her head. For the first time since leaving the Moon, she felt distinctly better. Looking back, that strange experience in the mining area had been too embarrassing for her to mention, but she would have to find words for it sooner or later. She felt a vague sense of dread, as if a monstrous presence in that sea of mist had become aware of her, and had been watching her since then, but even that she would deal with. She gently pushed herself away, left Olympiada to her own devices and floated over to the bistro.

‘How are you?’ she asked.

‘Fine.’ Rogachev, strapped into a harness, looked up from his computer. ‘You?’

‘Better.’ She rubbed her temples with her index fingers. ‘The pressure is easing.’

‘Glad to hear it.’

‘But what if I yield to my professional curiosity?’

‘You can ask anything you like.’ Rogachev’s smile melted the ice between his blond eyelashes a little. ‘As long as you don’t expect to get an answer to everything.’

‘What are you doing on that computer all the time?’

‘Julian deserves a response. We had a fantastic week thanks to him. However it may have ended, we were given a lot. And now we’ve got to give something in return.’

‘You want to invest?’ asked Mukesh Nair, floating over.

‘Why not?’

‘After this disaster?’

‘So?’ Oleg Rogachev shrugged. ‘Did people stop building ships just because the Titanic went down?’

‘I’ll admit, I’m uneasy.’

‘You know how failure works, Mukesh. It’s always sparked by a fear of crisis. It starts with a soluble problem, but it drags a psychosis along behind it. A shark psychosis. It only takes one shark to paralyse the tourism of a whole region, because no one will go into the water even though the likelihood of being eaten tends to zero. The collapse of the economy, of the financial markets, has always involved psychoses. Not the individual terrorist attack, not the bankruptcy of an individual bank, the threat comes from the general paralysis that follows. Should I make my decision to invest in Julian’s project, in the breakthrough of the global energy supply, dependent on a shark?’

‘The shark was an atom bomb, Oleg!’ Nair opened his eyes wide. ‘Possibly the start of a global conflict.’

‘Or not.’

‘At any rate, there was nothing Julian could have done about it,’ Evelyn confirmed. ‘We were the victim of an attack meant for somebody else. We were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘But someone must know who was behind it!’

‘And what are you going to do if they don’t?’ Rogachev asked ironically. ‘Suspend all space travel?’

‘You know very well that’s not what I think,’ Mukesh grumbled. ‘I just wonder if an investment would be sensible.’

‘I do too.’

‘And?’

Rogachev pointed at the computer screen. ‘I’ve worked it out. There’s about six hundred thousand tonnes of helium-3 stored on the Moon, ten times the potential energy yield of all the oil, gas and coal supplies on Earth. Perhaps even more, because the concentration of the isotope on the back of the Moon might be even higher than it is in the Earth’s shadow. That’s five metres of saturated regolith; the most interesting part is the first two to three metres, or exactly the depth ploughed by the beetles.’ Rogachev typed on his computer. ‘Leaving out transport to Earth, the energy balance is as follows: one gram of regolith equals seventeen hundred and fifty Joules. Some of this is lost in heating and processing, leaving us with, let’s say, fifteen hundred Joules. That’s an area of ten thousand square kilometres that needs to be ploughed and processed to cover the current energy needs of Earth. One thousandth of the Moon’s surface. Where productivity is concerned, beetles work with sunlight, which means that they spend half the year without energy, meaning that we would need twice as many of the things as we have at present.’

‘And how many is that?’

‘A few thousand.’

‘A few thousand?’ cried Mukesh.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Oleg, unmoved. ‘Assuming we’re deploying that many, then supplies would last for around four thousand years, always assuming that the world population stagnates and the Third World’s energy needs remain lower than those of the developed countries. Neither of these two things will be the case. Realistically, we can expect a global population of twenty-five billion by the end of the century, and an overall increase in electricity usage. In that case the Moon will supply us with energy for seven hundred years at most.’

‘And then?’ asked Evelyn Chambers.

‘We’ll have used up another fossil resource, and we’ll be standing right where we are today. The Moon will have been levelled, uninteresting to hotels and pleasure trips, but may have been able to preserve a few conservation areas. Whether we’ll be able to see them for dust is a whole other question.’

‘Thousands of mining machines.’ Nair shook his head. ‘That’s crazy! We’ll never be able to pay for them.’

‘We will.’ Rogachev snapped the computer shut. ‘We had a deficit problem with space travel, too. The lift changed everything, and building a few thousand machines like that isn’t such big news. Thousands of tanks will be built too, and a levelled moon is just a levelled moon.’

‘Shit,’ Chambers said to herself.

‘Yes, shit. I know what you’re thinking. Yet again we’ve destroyed a natural wonder for the sake of a short-term effect.’

‘But it’s going to be worth it?’

‘It’ll be worth it for seven hundred years, and from a distance the Moon won’t look much different from what it looks like today.’ Oleg pursed his lips. ‘So I think I’m going to invest part of the originally planned sum in Orley Space.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘Not least on your advice.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Have you forgotten? Isla de las Estrellas?’

‘I hadn’t been to the mining zone then.’

‘I understand. Shark psychosis.’

‘No, not at all. You’ve just expressed in words what I’d already worked out in the land of mists. The idiocy of the whole thing. When we talk about moon mining, most people think about a few lonely bulldozers lost in the vastness of the Moon. Instead, we’re losing the Moon to the bulldozers.’ She shook her head. ‘Of course it’s better to destroy the Moon than the Earth, aneutronic fusion is clean, and if it lasts seven hundred years, then fine. But I’m still allowed to think it’s crap.’

‘I thought I’d put the other half of the money into buying up Warren Locatelli’s Lightyears.’

‘What?’ Mukesh Nair rolled his eyes. ‘You want to—’

‘I don’t want to look ruthless.’ Rogachev raised both hands. ‘Warren’s dead, but holding back won’t bring him back to life. He was a little god, and like all gods he left a vacuum. In my view, Lightyears is the best imaginable candidate for a buyout. Warren Locatelli did amazing things in solar technology, there’s still much to come and the best brains in the sector are working for his company. So let’s be under no illusions: solar technology’s going to be the only way of solving our energy problems in the long term!’ He smiled. ‘So we may not even have to level the Moon.’

‘And you’re sure that Lightyears will simply allow itself to be swallowed up?’ the Indian asked suspiciously.

‘Hostile takeover.’

‘You’ll have to offer a huge amount of money.’

‘I know. Are you in?’

‘God almighty, you ask some questions!’ Nair rubbed his fleshy nose. ‘This isn’t really my area. I’m just a simple—’

‘Farmer’s son, I know.’

‘I’ll have to think about it, Oleg.’

‘Do that. I’ve already talked to Julian. He’s with me. Walo too.’

‘One of them gets a leg, the other an arm,’ hummed Evelyn, as Nair floated off with solar cells in his eyes. Rogachev smiled his vulpine smile and remained silent for a moment.

‘And you?’ he asked. ‘What are you going to do?’

She looked at him. ‘About Julian?

‘You do administer the capital of public opinion, as you put it so nicely.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Evelyn pulled a face. ‘I won’t hurt him.’

‘A good friend,’ Rogachev chuckled.

‘Friendship hasn’t got much to do with it, Oleg. I was well disposed towards his projects before I went to the Moon, and I still am, regardless of what I think about the plundering that’s going on up there. He’s a pioneer, an innovator. No criminal gang is going to blow my sympathies for him out of my head just like that.’

‘So are you going to make a programme about what happened?’

‘Of course. Will you be on it?’

‘If you like.’

‘In that case can I take the opportunity to ask you some questions about your private life?’

‘No, you can only do that here.’ He winked at her. ‘As a friend.’

‘At the moment the word is that you’re being abandoned.’

‘Ah, right.’ He glanced away. ‘Yes, I think Olympiada mentioned something along those lines.’

‘Christ, Oleg!’

He shrugged. ‘What do you expect? Since we got married she’s left me every two weeks or so.’

‘She seems to mean it this time.’

‘I’d be glad if she would turn her thoughts into actions. Admittedly this is the first time she’s left me without being falling-down drunk.’

‘You don’t care?’

‘No! It’s way overdue.’

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t get this at all. Why don’t you just leave her, in that case?’

‘I did, ages ago.’

‘Officially, I mean.’

‘Because I promised her father I wouldn’t.’

‘I see. All that macho crap.’

‘What? Keeping your promises?’ Rogachev studied her. ‘Shall I tell you the biggest reproach she levels at me, Evelyn? Do you want to know? What do you think?’

‘No idea.’ She shrugged. ‘Infidelity? Cynicism?’

‘No. That I’ve never taken the trouble to lie to her. Can you imagine that? The trouble?’

Confused, Evelyn said nothing.

‘But I don’t lie,’ said Rogachev. ‘You can accuse me of all sorts of things, probably rightly, but if there’s something that I’ve never done and never will do, it’s lying or breaking promises. Can you imagine that? Someone ignoring all your bad qualities and telling you off for your good one?’

‘Perhaps she means it’s more bearable—’

‘For whom? For her? She could have gone, at any time. She should never have married me. She knew me, she knew exactly who I am, and that Ginsburg and I were just trying to marry our fortunes together. But Olympiada agreed because she couldn’t think of anything better to do, and even today she can’t think of anything to do but suffer.’ Rogachev shook his head. ‘Believe me, I’ll never stop her. I’ll never force her to leave me. She may think I’ve degraded her, but she’s got to regain her own dignity. Olympiada says she’s dying by my side. That’s tough. But I can’t save her life, she has to save her own life, by going.’

Evelyn stared at her fingertips. Suddenly she saw the foot of the beetle coming down again, felt the creature’s pale eye settling on her from the realm of the dead. I see you, it said. I’ll watch you every day as you prepare yourself for death.

‘You’ve saved my life,’ she said quietly. ‘Did I ever thank you for that?’

‘I think you’re trying to right now,’ said Rogachev.

She hesitated. Then she leaned across and kissed him on the cheek.

‘I think you’ve got a few more positive characteristics,’ she said. ‘Even if you’re pretty ignorant otherwise.’

Rogachev nodded.

‘I should have started sooner,’ he said. ‘My father was a brave man, braver than the lot of us put together, but I couldn’t save his life. I try again every day, by piling up money for him, buying companies for him, submitting people to my will and thus to his, but still he is shot over and over again. He will never come back to life, and I don’t know how to deal with it. There’s no middle way, Evelyn. Either you’re too far away, or you’re too close to it.’

‘You’re not that far apart,’ hissed Amber. She was angry, because Julian and Tim could do nothing but bicker, and even angrier about the immovable persistence with which each clung to his resentment, while Lynn slept her time away as if under chloroform. ‘Both of you suspected her of being in a pact with Carl.’

‘Because that’s how she behaved,’ said Tim.

‘Ludicrous! As if Lynn would seriously have been capable of destroying her own hotel!’

‘You saw her yourself,’ bellowed Julian. ‘It may seem weird to us in retrospect, but Lynn is mentally disturbed.’

‘Not much gets past you, does it?’ sneered Tim.

‘That’s enough,’ Amber snapped at him. ‘This is kindergarten stuff. Either you learn to talk to each other sensibly, or it’ll be me you’re dealing with. Both of you!’

They had withdrawn into the landing module so as not to let the others see the spectacle of their rancour. Neither of them was any good at holding things back. The mouldering corpse of their family life lay naked and repulsive before them, ready for the autopsy. After the Io had rescued Nina Hedegaard from a hell of dust, and the surviving members of the group had climbed aboard the landing module to get back to the mother ship, Lynn had collapsed in tears. Immediately after the coupling manoeuvre, she had regained consciousness, without recognising anybody, faded away again and set off on a horrific twenty-four-hour journey. Since then she had looked more or less composed, except that she couldn’t remember most of what had happened on the Moon. Now she was asleep again.

‘Just to clear up a few things—’ Tim began.

‘Stop.’ Amber shook her head.

‘Why?’

‘I said, stop!’

‘You don’t know what I—’

‘I do. You want to attack your father! How long is this going to go on for? What are you actually accusing him of? Of making space travel economically viable? Of giving zillions of people jobs?’

‘No.’

‘Of making people’s dreams come true? Of fighting for clean energy, for a better world?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then what?’ she yelled. ‘Oh, Christ, I’m so fed up with this wretched trench warfare. So fed up!’

‘Amber.’ Tim crouched down. ‘He didn’t care. When we—’

‘Care about what?’ she interrupted him. ‘Maybe he wasn’t there for you very often. As I see it, he cares day in, day out, for a weird cosmic phenomenon called humanity, which does all kinds of terrible, stupid things. Sorry, Tim, but I can’t stand the peevish way young people talk about their parents, even if they produce miracles, all that in-an-ideal-world claptrap – I don’t buy it, I’m afraid.’

‘It isn’t just that he wasn’t around,’ Tim defended himself, ‘but that on the few occasions when he should have been there, he wasn’t! That Crystal lost her m—’

‘You’re completely unfair, you little shit,’ Julian snorted. ‘Your mother had a genetic predisposition.’

‘Crap!’

‘She did! Capito, hombre? She’d have lost her mind even if I’d been there for her every hour of every day.’

‘You know very well that—’

‘No, she was sick! It was in her genes, and before I married her she’d fried half of her brain on coke anyway. And where Lynn’s concerned—’

‘Where Lynn’s concerned, you listen to me,’ Amber interrupted. ‘Because as a matter of fact, and Tim’s completely right here, you can’t look into anyone else’s head. You think life’s a film and you’re directing it, and everyone acts and thinks according to the script. I don’t know whether you really love Lynn, or only the part that she’s supposed to play for you—’

‘Of course I love her!’

‘Okay, you’ve done everything for her, you’ve made sure she had the best possible career, but have you ever been interested in her? Are you sure you’ve ever really been interested in anyone?’

‘Christ alive, why have I organised all this, in that case?’

‘No, no.’ She raised a finger. ‘Listen, little Julian, to what your aunt says! You make films and you cast people in them. With ten billion extras and Lynn in the main part.’

‘That’s not true!’

‘Yes, it is. You can’t see that your daughter is manic-depressive, and that she threatens to suffer the same fate as her mother.’

‘Exactly,’ cried Tim. ‘Because you—’

‘Shut it, Tim! Look, Julian, it’s not that you don’t want to see it, you just don’t see it! Come down to earth. Lynn’s unusually talented, she has brilliant qualities, just like you do, but unlike you she hasn’t got power flowing through her veins, she’s not a natural mover and shaker, and she doesn’t have a buffalo hide. So stop selling her as perfect and beating up on her because she’ll never dare to contradict you. Ease off on the pressure. Say after me: Lynn – is – not – like – me!’

‘Erm – Julian?’

Amber looked up. Nina Hedegaard, visibly troubled, was hovering in the airlock leading to the habitation units. Julian turned his head and forced himself to assume a relaxed expression.

‘Come in, come in. We were just swapping funny family stories and discussing our next Christmas party.’

‘I don’t mean to bother you.’ She smiled shyly. ‘Hello, Amber. Hi, Tim.’

Since the Charon had set off on its long trip back to the OSS, Julian had stopped trying to hide his relationship with the pilot. Amber liked Nina and felt sorry for her, particularly for the way she believed Julian when he hinted at their future together.

‘What’s up?’ asked Julian.

‘I’ve got Jennifer Shaw on the line.’

‘I’ll be right there.’ He strolled to the airlock, all too willingly, it seemed to Amber.

‘And then you come right back,’ she added. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet.’

‘Yes,’ sighed Julian. ‘I was afraid of that.’

Tim opened his mouth to make a disagreeable remark. Amber flashed a glance at him that made him think better of it.

Lynn was sharpening the blade of her suspicions.

What had happened on the Moon seemed like a single, painful dream sequence, and in fact she had difficulty remembering the last few hours in Gaia. But when Dana Lawrence floated past in her sleeping bag at the same moment as she opened her eyes, cast her a glance and asked her how she was, a synaptic firework exploded in her brain, and she couldn’t help it. She said:

‘Piss off to hell, you two-faced snake.’

Dana paused, with her head thrown back, her eyelids heavy with arrogance. The voices of the others could be heard from the next sector along. Then she came closer.

‘What’s your problem with me, Lynn? I haven’t done anything to you.’

‘You’ve questioned my authority.’

‘No, I was loyal. Do you think it was fun watching Kokoschka burn, even if he was in cahoots with Hanna? I had to order the evacuation.’

The stupid thing was that she was right. By now Lynn knew that she had behaved in an extremely paranoid way, even though she wondered in what context it might have been. For example she hadn’t understood why she hadn’t wanted to show Julian certain films. And she couldn’t remember her wild escape across the glass bridges, seconds before the fire had broken out, but she could remember Hanna’s betrayal, the bomb and the operation to rescue the people trapped in Gaia’s head. For a moment she had regained her leadership qualities, before her mind had given in once and for all. That it was now working again seemed at first like a miracle, although she wasn’t particularly pleased, since the generator of her emotions had clearly suffered some damage. Listless and depressed, she couldn’t even remember what it was like to feel joy. On the other hand she knew what she definitely hadn’t dreamed about in all that confusion. It was clearly in front of her eyes, it echoed in her ears, a matter in which Lawrence played an inglorious part.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said.

‘I did my job, Lynn,’ Dana said, insulted. ‘If shortcomings in the planning and construction of Gaia led to disaster, you can’t blame me.’

‘There were no shortcomings. When will we actually get there?’

‘In about three hours.’.

Lynn started unbuckling herself. She was thirsty. And for something specific, grapefruit juice. So she wasn’t just thirsty, she’d got an appetite. An emotional reaction, almost.

‘They should have put in more emergency exits,’ Dana Lawrence said, trickling acid into the wounds. ‘The throat was a bottleneck.’

‘Didn’t I sack you?’

‘You did.’

‘Then shut up.’

Lynn pushed Lawrence aside and slipped over to the hatch leading to the next area. As always, everyone would be very nice and caring, Embarrassing, embarrassing, it should have been her task to ask Julian’s guests what they would like. But she was ill. Gradually, in manageable portions, Tim had told her the full extent of the disaster, so by now she knew who had died and under what circumstances. And again she had struggled to feel anything, grief, or at the very least rage, and had come up with nothing but dull despair.

‘What did she want?’

‘What?’ Julian took off his headphones.

‘I said, what did she want?’

Tim tried not to sound unfriendly. Julian turned his head. The command panel of the Charon was in the back part of the sleeping area. Through the open bulkhead they could see into the adjacent lounge, where Heidrun, Sushma and Olympiada were in conversation with Finn O’Keefe, while Walo Ögi was despairing over one of Karla Kramp’s castling manoeuvres.

‘Something really strange,’ Julian said quietly. ‘She was asking how many bombs we found at the moon base.’

‘How many?’

‘Apparently there were two mini-nukes aboard that rocket from Equatorial Guinea. There’s another one of those things up there.’

He said it in such a calm and matter-of-fact way that it took Tim a moment to understand the full import of the news.

‘Shit,’ he whispered. ‘Does Palmer know about this?’

‘They informed him straight away. Panic must have broken out at the base. They want to inspect the caves again.’

‘You mean, in case a bomb is found—’

‘Hanna may have hidden a second one.’

‘Pah.’

‘Mm-hm.’ Julian rested a hand on Tim’s shoulder. ‘Whatever, we don’t want to tell the world about it.’

‘I don’t know, Julian.’ Tim frowned. ‘Do you seriously think he put the second bomb in the caves as well?’

‘You don’t?’

‘When there was already one in there? I’d find a different place for a second one.’

‘That’s true too.’ Julian rubbed his beard. ‘And what if the second mini-nuke isn’t meant for the base?’

‘Who else would it be meant for?’

‘I’ve just got this idea. A bit crude, perhaps. But just imagine that someone’s trying to stir the Chinese and Americans up against each other. Not hard, given that they mixed it up last year. So what if the second bomb—’

‘Was meant for the Chinese?’ Tim slowly exhaled. ‘You should write novels. But okay. There’s a third possibility.’

‘Which is?’

‘The mining zone.’

‘Yeah.’ Julian gnawed on his lower lip. ‘And there’s nothing we can do about it.’

‘But how about I tell Amber?’

‘Okay, but no one else. I’ll have a talk to Jennifer and tell her what we think.’

Orley Space Station (OSS), Geostationary Orbit

They approached the space station at an angle, so that the massive 280-metre mushroom-shaped structure hung at a diagonal. By now they were all wearing their spacesuits again. Even though the Earth was still 36,000 kilometres away, seeing the OSS getting bigger on the screens was a bit like coming home: its five tori, the wide circle of its wharf, the extravagant modules of the Kirk and the Picard, the ring-shaped space harbour with its mobile airlocks, manipulators, freight shuttles and phalanxes of stumpy-winged evacuation pods. At 23.45 a hollow chime rang through the spaceship, along with a faint vibration as Hedegaard docked on the ring.

‘Please keep your suits on,’ said Nina. ‘The full kit. Your luggage—’

She fell silent. She had clearly realised that no one had any luggage. It had all been left in Gaia.

‘From the Charon we go straight to the Picard, where a snack bar has already been set up. We haven’t got much time – the lift will be there at about a quarter past twelve, and will leave the OSS straight away. We thought it – ahem, in your interest to get back to Earth as quickly as possible. You can store your helmets and backpacks in Torus-2.’

No one said anything. Gloomily they left the spaceship by the airlock, said farewell to their cramped flying hotel and, in a sense, belatedly to the Moon, which couldn’t in the end do anything about what had happened. They floated one after the other down the corridor to Torus-2, the distributor ring that accommodated the lobby and hotel reception. From there, connecting tunnels branched out, leading down to the suites and up through the levels to the part of the station used by the research teams with its labs, observatories and workshops. The two extendable airlocks on the inside of the torus which led to lift cabins were locked. Three astronauts were working on the consoles, checking the lift systems, overseeing the unloading of a freighter and repair work on a manipulator.

O’Keefe thought of the disc of the wharf, where spaceships were being built for bolder missions, of machines dashing through the silence of the universe and solar panels sparkling in the cold, white sun. Heidrun had pushed him out of the airlock up there, she had made fun of him, and Warren Locatelli had puked in his helmet.

How long ago was that? A decade? A century?

He wouldn’t be coming back, he knew that, as he set his helmet down on its shelf. Making brash science-fiction films, saving the universe, any time! Whatever the script called for. But no going back.

‘No,’ he said to himself.

‘No?’

Heidrun set her helmet down next to his. He turned his head and looked into her violet eyes. He studied her elfin face, saw her hair forming a flowing white fan in zero gravity. Felt his heart like a lump in his chest.

‘Would you come back?’ he asked. ‘Here? To the Moon?’

She thought for a moment.

‘Yes. I think I would.’

‘So you found something up here.’

‘A few things, Finn.’ She smiled. ‘Quite a lot, in fact. And you?’

Nothing, he wanted to say. I’ve just lost something. Before I had it.

‘Don’t know.’

He would never see her again either. He would stay out of everyone’s way. The world was full of lonely places, it was a lonely place. You didn’t have to go to the Moon to find one of those. Heidrun opened her lips and raised a hand as if to touch him.

‘In our next life,’ she said quietly.

‘But there’s only this one here,’ he answered roughly.

She nodded, lowered her head and slipped past him. A strand of her hair passed across his face and tickled his nose.

‘Mein Schatz,’ he heard Walo say. ‘Are you coming?’

‘Coming, sweetie!’

The lump was starting to hurt. Finn O’Keefe stared at his helmet, turned round and drifted after the others, his mind a blank.

Midnight had just gone. It had been such an effort to quell the excitement of the last few days that no one felt much like reviving it with caffeine, so everyone pounced on fruit juice and tea in the Picard. Julian would have liked to have some soup, but because eating soup in micro-gravity was pretty much a no-no, there was lasagne. He sawed a piece of it off and disappeared into the tunnel that led down to the suites, to phone the Earth from there.

Dana Lawrence joined him.

‘Not hungry?’ he asked.

‘No, I am. I just left my report in the Charon.’

He stopped outside his cabin, balancing his lasagne. Did this woman make any sense at all? In Gaia, she had proved her mettle, she had challenged the traitor Kokoschka and finished off Carl Hanna. Lynn couldn’t have made a better choice, and yet, thinking about it, it was the fact that any other choice was rationally unthinkable that unsettled him. Perhaps it was because of the image he had of women, of people in general, that he couldn’t make head or tail of her. He couldn’t imagine her bursting into tears or bursting out laughing. Her Madonna face with its heart-shaped mouth and piercing eyes made him think of a replicant, of Brooke Adams’ post-pod character in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in the scene in which she opens her mouth and emits the hollow, unearthly scream of an alien. Clearly very intelligent and passably attractive, Dana Lawrence was miles away from any kind of passion.

‘I must thank you,’ he said. ‘I know Lynn wasn’t always – always quite up to it during the crisis.’

‘She fought remarkably well.’

‘But I also know that Lynn’s initial enthusiasm for you turned into rejection. Don’t blame her. Lynn’s judgement was clouded during this trip. You were farsighted and brave.’

‘I did my job.’ She mimicked a smile, making her features softer but no more sensual. ‘Will you excuse me?’

‘Of course.’ She floated past him and disappeared down the next side corridor.

Julian immediately forgot about her. He hungrily sniffed his lasagne, looked into the scanner and slipped into his cabin.

Dana reached Torus-1, with its bars, libraries and common rooms – then continued on and slipped into the long tunnel which led towards the upper level and connected the OSS Grand with Torus-2. Only two astronauts were still on duty at the terminal.

‘I have to go to Charon for a minute,’ she said to them. ‘For some documents.’

One of the men nodded. ‘Fine.’

She turned away, disappeared into the corridor that linked Torus-2 with the outer ring of the space harbour and drifted towards the airlock behind which the spaceship lay at anchor. Everything was still going to plan. Hydra still hadn’t lost, quite the contrary. It was only Lynn’s suspicion that unsettled her, as she couldn’t work out how it had come about. But even that wasn’t particularly important. Dana opened the bulkhead leading to the Charon and looked behind her, but no one had followed her down the corridor. In the Picard they were indulging in lasagne and homesickness. She sped into the landing unit and on into the habitation module, crossed the bistro, the lounge and started working away at the wall covering.

Hanna had told her exactly where to do it.

And there she was.

The lightning flash of memory. Amazing how it appeared in the middle of heavy cloud cover. She couldn’t remember exactly what she’d done in the igloo, but she could see Carl Hanna very clearly, before she had sunk to the floor by the coffee machine, frozen with terror. She saw him murdering Tommy Wachowski, heard his quiet, traitorous cursing:

Dana, for fuck’s sake. Come on!

Dana.

Her suspicions had already been aroused a few hours ago, when Dana Lawrence had hypocritically asked her how she was, but now it was certain. Hanna had tried to make contact with the bitch, in a way that revealed that the contact had been prearranged. Why? Drawing the necessary conclusions would have taken a considerable amount of energy, too much to put Julian in the picture as well, particularly since she didn’t talk much to her father any more. It had dawned on her that she felt a lot better as soon as she banished him from the centre of her thoughts. At the same time she missed him, as a puppet misses the hand that moves it, and she was already aware, at least on an intellectual level, that she actually idolised him. Maybe she no longer felt what she felt, but at least she still knew what she felt.

Something had gone wrong in her life, and Dana Lawrence had played an inglorious part in that.

Lynn peered down the corridor.

Determined not to let her enemy out of her sight, she had followed Dana Lawrence when she had left the Picard with Julian. The cunning of madness, she thought, almost with amusement, but the madness had fled. A few seconds passed, then she slipped after Lawrence. At the end of the corridor she saw that the Charon’s bulkhead was open, and knew that Lawrence was in the spaceship.

I’ll get you, she thought. I will prove you’re a snake, and the seething hatred that I know you feel for me will be your downfall. You shouldn’t have allowed yourself to be dragged into all this, unapproachable, unassailable, controlled Dana, but you aren’t unassailable after all. You didn’t try to shatter the others’ confidence in me for nothing. You will pay.

She floated silently over the rim of the bulkhead, crossed the landing module, the bistro, the lounge. She glimpsed Dana in the sleeping area bent over something angular, the size of a briefcase, that she had taken from the opened wall. Saw her fingers darting over a keyboard and entering some data:

Nine hours: 09.00

The plan was so simple, so efficient at its core. Launching a rocket to the Moon and detonating it above Peary Base might have worked, but its trajectory would be immediately traceable, and the risk of missing the base was great as well. To fire another missile at the OSS, whether from Earth or a satellite, was practically impossible. The rocket would have been intercepted, and here too the reconstruction of its flight-path would have led straight to its originator.

But Hydra had come up with the perfect solution. Two mini-nukes, disguised in a communication satellite, from which they could travel unnoticed to the Moon and land some distance from the base, to stay there until someone came to take them out of the capsule and put them in the right places. One in the base, the second in the spaceship that would bring the bomb and the killers back to the OSS. Immediately before leaving the base, set bomb 1, then hide bomb 2 in the OSS, program that too and travel quite officially back to Earth in the lift before the timers set off both explosions, destroying both Peary Base and the OSS. The perfect double whammy.

A trajectory that couldn’t be reconstructed.

Okay, they’d messed up Peary. They wouldn’t mess up the OSS. At half past nine, when they had all long-since arrived on Isla de las Estrellas, or were back on the way to their own countries, the space station would vaporise, leaving only a few thousand kilometres of feather-light carbon rope to fall into the Pacific. They probably didn’t even need to get the bomb out of the spaceship. The Charon was supposed to be at anchor for at least two days, as she had learned in the terminal. It didn’t really make any difference whether she hid the mini-nuke in the ceiling cover of the airlock or just left it where it was.

08.59

08.58

She looked contentedly at the blinking box. And as she was savouring her triumph, the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

There was someone there.

Right behind her.

Dana swung round.

That moment she felt a kick in the chest that threw her against the wall of the cabin. The mini-nuke slipped from her hands and sailed away. Lynn reached out for it, missed it, ended up at an angle and started rotating on her own axis. Dana dashed after the spinning bomb, felt a hand gripping her ankle and was pulled back. In front of her eyes Julian’s daughter darted upwards, grabbed the box and fled, carried on her own momentum, to the lounge and from there to the landing module.

She must not leave the Charon.

Dana hurried after her. Just before the airlock she caught up with Lynn, grabbed her by the collar and dragged her back inside the unit. Lynn somersaulted, tightly gripping the bomb, and wedged herself, legs spread, in the passageway to the habitation module. Lawrence risked a glance over her shoulder. Through the open bulkhead she could see into the airlock and glimpse the connecting corridor. There was still no one to be seen, but she knew the airlock was under surveillance. She couldn’t afford to let the silent struggle continue outside the Charon.

Julian’s daughter stared at her, gripping the ticking atom bomb like a cherished object from which she never wanted to be parted.

‘Indecisive?’ she grinned.

‘Give me that thing, Lynn.’ Dana was breathing heavily, less out of exertion than out of rage. ‘Right now.’

‘No.’

‘It’s an expensive scientific device. I don’t know what’s got into you, but you’re about to ruin a very high-level experiment. Your father will be furious.’

‘Oh, really?’ Lynn rolled her eyes spookily. ‘Will he?’

‘Lynn, please!’

‘I know what this is, you bitch. It’s a bomb, exactly like the one you and Carl hid in the base.’

‘You’re confused, Lynn. You—’

‘Don’t you dare!’ yelled Lynn. ‘I’m completely fine.’

‘Okay.’ Dana raised conciliatory hands. ‘You’re completely fine. But that isn’t a bomb.’

‘Then you won’t have a problem letting me out!’

Dana clenched her fists and didn’t move, as her thoughts did somersaults. She had to get hold of the mini-nuke, but what was she to do with the madwoman who clearly wasn’t as crazy as all that? If she let Lynn live and go back to the others, she might just as well hand over the bomb and admit everything.

‘Problems?’ Lynn giggled. ‘Without me the lift won’t return to Earth, will it? They’ll spend hours looking for me, and you’ll have to join in. There’s nothing you can do.’

‘Give me the box,’ Dana said, struggling to control herself, and floated closer.

Lynn lowered the bomb. For a moment it looked as if she was wondering whether she could comply with Dana’s demand, then she suddenly threw herself back into the habitation module.

‘And now?’ she asked.

Dana bared her teeth.

And suddenly she lost her head, reached for the disguised pocket on her thigh and brought out Carl Hanna’s gun. Lynn’s eyes widened. She leapt after the bomb. Her hand hit the sensor that controlled the bulkhead between the module and the habitation unit. Dana cursed, but the connecting door closed too quickly, no chance of getting through it, at best she’d be trapped. Through the narrowing gap she saw Lynn’s torso, her flying, ash-blonde hair half covering her face, took aim and shot.

The bulkhead thumped shut. She went straight to the control panel and tried to open it again, but it didn’t budge. Lynn must have activated the emergency lock.

She hammered furiously against the steel door.

Too late.

Her body drifted somersaulting through the lounge.

Spirals turned before her eyes. With a great effort, Lynn focused her ideas on the command panel in the rear zone, straightened out, gripped the edge of the next passageway and impelled herself forwards to the control console.

The terminal. She had to call the terminal.

‘Lynn Orley,’ she gasped. ‘Can anyone hear me?’ Oops! Something wrong with her voice? Why did she sound so feeble, so crushed?

‘Miss Orley, yes, I can hear you.’

‘Put me through to my father. He’s in his – his suite. Quickly, get a move on!’

‘Straight away, Miss Orley.’

Something had found its way through the crack. Something that hurt and dulled her senses. Everything went dark.

‘Julian,’ she whispered. ‘Daddy?’

Dana was beside herself. She’d been duped. She’d let her feelings take control, rather than diplomacy. Flight was the only option now. It didn’t matter whether she’d killed Lynn, wounded her, or even missed her entirely, she had to get out of the OSS before the lift arrived. She furiously catapulted herself out of the landing module, pelted down the corridor and into the torus, took aim and shot one of the astronauts in the head.

The man tipped sideways and drifted slowly away. With her legs outstretched she braked herself and aimed the barrel of her gun at the other one. He stared at her in silent horror, his hands over the touchscreen.

‘Get one of the evacuation pods!’ she yelled. ‘Quickly!’

The man trembled.

‘Go, now! Get it!’

Inflamed with rage, she whacked him in the face. He gripped the console to stay upright.

‘I can’t,’ he panted.

‘Are you mad?’ Of course he could, why couldn’t he? ‘Do you want to die?’

‘No – please—’

Stupid jerk! Trying to hold her up! All the docking ports could be relocated along the ring, she knew that. He would just park the Charon somewhere else, and instead take one of the pods to the airlock and anchor it there.

‘Just do it,’ she hissed.

‘I can’t, I really can’t.’ The astronaut gulped and licked his lips. ‘Not during the launching process.’

‘Why the launching process?’

‘Wh-when a ship launches, I can’t relocate the docking port, I have to wait till—’

‘Launches?’ she yelled at him. ‘What’s launching?’

‘The—’ He closed his eyes. The movement of his lips was oddly out of time with what he said, as if he were praying at the same time. Spittle glistened at the corners of his mouth, and he was losing control of his bladder.

‘Open your mouth, damn it!’

‘The Charon. It’s the Charon. It’s – it’s launching.’

‘Daddy?’

Julian gave a start. He had just been talking to Jennifer Shaw, when a second window had appeared in the holowall.

‘Lynn,’ he said with surprise. ‘Sorry, Jennifer.’

‘Daddy, you’ve got to stop her.’

Her face was right up against the camera, sunken and waxy, as if she were about to lose consciousness. He immediately switched Shaw to standby.

‘Lynn, is everything okay?’

She shook her head feebly.

‘Where are you?’

‘In the spaceship. I’ve launched Charon.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘I’m flying away – I’m taking – the bomb away from here.’ Julian saw her eyelids fluttering and her head tipping over. ‘She’s smuggled a second bomb on board, she or – Carl, I don’t know—’

‘Lynn!’

His hands gripped the console. Slow as snake venom the realisation of what was happening seeped into his consciousness. Of course! It made horrible sense. This wasn’t just a blow against the Americans, it was an attack on space travel!

‘Lynn, don’t do it!’ he urged. ‘Bring Charon back! You can’t do this!’

‘You’ve got to stop her,’ she whispered. ‘Dana – it’s Dana Lawrence. She’s the – she’s Hanna’s—’

‘Lynn! No!’

‘I’m – I’m sorry, Daddy.’ Her words were barely audible, a breath. She closed her eyes. ‘So sorry.’

The spaceship decoupled. The massive steel claws that connected it to the airlock opened to reveal the Charon.

It drifted slowly out into open space.

Julian’s voice reached her ear. He called her name, over and over again, as if he had lost his mind.

Lynn lay down on her back.

Nonsense, of course, she was weightless. Just a matter of perspective whether she was lying on her back or her belly. She might even have been lying on her side, of course she was lying on her side, all at the same time, but from here she could see the bomb that floated above her, spinning listlessly.

The display blurred in front of her eyes.

08.47

No, not 8. Wasn’t that two zeros? 00.47?

00.46

46 minutes? Minutes, of course, what else. Or seconds?

Not enough time. She needed thrust.

Thrust!

Before her eyes, little red spheres wobbled through space, some tiny, others as big as marbles. She reached for them, rubbed one to goo between her fingers, and suddenly she realised that the red bead curtain was coming out of her chest. There was something annoying there, eating away at her strength and restricting her movements, and she was terribly tired, but she couldn’t lapse into unconsciousness. She had to pick up speed to put some distance between herself and the OSS. Then, once she was far enough away, get rid of the bomb. Somehow. Throw it overboard. Or escape into the landing module and decouple the habitation unit with the mini-nuke. And get back.

Something like that.

Her jaws opened and closed like a fish. She painfully pumped air into her lungs and rolled around.

‘Haskin,’ yelled Julian. He’d tried to call the terminal, but there had been no answer. Now he was talking to the technical department. In fact, Haskin hadn’t been on duty that night, but in the circumstances he’d been willing to assume charge of the standby team. Unfortunately he was in Torus-5, in the roof of OSS, far from the space harbour.

‘My God, Julian, what—’

‘Comb the station! Look for Dana Lawrence, arrest the woman. Possibly she’s in the terminal!’

‘Just a moment. I don’t understand—’

‘I don’t care whether you understand it or not! Look for Dana Lawrence – the woman’s a terrorist. No one’s answering in the terminal. And stop the Charon. Stop it!’

He left Haskin’s helpless, startled face on the screen and whirled around to the cabin bulkhead.

‘Open up!’

Dana stared at the controls, with the barrel of the gun pressed against the astronaut’s temple, and listened to the radio traffic. She’d heard every word. The touching conversation between Lynn and her father, Julian’s patriarchal bellow. Lynn sounded injured, she’d managed to hit the miserable spoilsport. Small consolation, but Haskin’s men would be here soon.

‘Block access to the torus,’ she ordered.

‘I can’t,’ panted the astronaut.

‘You can! I know you can.’

‘You don’t know shit. I can close the entryways, but I can’t lock them. They’re going to get in, whether it suits you or not.’

‘What about the pod?’

‘The Charon’s too close. I swear that’s the truth!’

Then she would have to do something else. She didn’t need the external airlock. There were emergency entrances to the pods themselves, wherever they happened to be parked, she just somehow had to get to the outer ring and grab one of them. That jabbering piece of humanity there couldn’t help her, but she might still need the guy. Lawrence whacked him over the head again and left the toppling body to its own devices as she headed for the shelves of helmets.

Julian was consumed with anxiety. He bumped his shoulders and his head as he dashed through Torus-1 towards the corridor that led up to the terminal, tried to regain control of himself, and that wasn’t good. He’d never found any of the distances in the station particularly great, but now he felt as if he were floating on the spot, and he kept crashing into things.

He was terribly worried.

She had looked as if the life was flowing out of her. Her voice had been getting more and more halting and thin – she must have been injured, seriously injured. But the worst thing was that Haskin had hardly any chance of getting the Charon back. It wasn’t a drifting astronaut this time, it was a massive spaceship, and if Lynn—

Oh, no, he thought. Please not. Don’t start the engine.

Lynn! Please don’t—

—start the engine.

Again and again she had to fight the descending darkness, while her fingers groped around, but as long as she couldn’t see anything it wasn’t much use. She knew she was still too close to the OSS. For safety’s sake she needed to get a lot further away, because otherwise there was a danger that the burning gases would damage parts of the construction. With the best will in the world she couldn’t remember the time span on the display of the mini-nuke, just that it was tight, bloody tight!

She coughed. All around her, weird and beautiful, drifted the sparkling red beads of her blood. Weightlessness had the advantage that you couldn’t really collapse, you didn’t need any energy to stay on your feet, so that her physical systems were able to mobilise one last, impossible reserve of energy. Her vision cleared. Her fingers, determined, albeit hesitant and straying, went travelling: stretched and bent. Indicators lit up, a soft, automatic voice began to speak. She forced her body into the pilot’s seat, but she hadn’t the strength to buckle herself in. Just to start the acceleration process.

Lynn stretched out her right arm. The tip of her index finger landed gently on the smooth surface of the touchscreen, and the jets ignited, developing maximum thrust. She was pressed into the padding and lost consciousness.

The Charon fired away.

Leave the torus. Via one of the internal gangways. Get to one of the massive lattice masts that formed the spine of the OSS, climb along the struts to the space harbour, prepare one of the pods, decouple, set course for Earth. The things worked a bit like old-fashioned space shuttles, which they also superficially resembled, except that unlike their predecessors they had generous fuel supplies, so that once the stolen vehicle had entered the Earth’s atmosphere she could land anywhere in the world, where no one would find her.

That was the plan.

Lawrence floated to one of the two gangways, as her suit checked the life-support systems and made sure her helmet was on correctly. Behind the closed bulkhead lay a short tunnel, a mobile airlock whose segments were still telescoped together. When the space-lift reached the inside of the torus, they would stretch out to their full length and connect the torus with the cabin, so that the guests could transfer from there to the station, just as they had done on her arrival. She quickly opened the bulkhead. The opposite end of the airlock was sealed, with a porthole in the middle through which the external lights of the lift cables shimmered.

She had been faster than Haskin. She no longer needed the unconscious astronaut. Just to pump the air out of the lock, open it and get out, without any of those idiots stopping her. With her gun ready in its holster, she slipped into the tunnel.

Julian flew out of the corridor, bumped against the ceiling, ignored the pain, looked wildly in all directions. Someone drifted below him. Open eyes staring vacantly, liquid pearling from a small hole in his forehead. Where the bagel-shaped body of the torus curved away, a second body circulated slowly, impossible to say whether it was dead or unconscious. Julian pushed himself off, slid along just below the ceiling and saw that a bulkhead was open on the inward-facing side, immediately below him.

One of the gangways branched off from it.

Dana?

Fury, hatred, fear, they all came together. He did a handstand, darted into the airlock, bumped against a person in a spacesuit who was about to operate the closing mechanism, pulled them away from the controls and deeper inside the airlock. He clearly recognised Dana Lawrence’s surprised Madonna face, as her UV visor was still raised, then their bodies struck the outer portal, rebounded and spun somersaulting back towards the torus. Dana fumbled for purchase, collided with the wall of the tunnel, pushed away and threw herself against him. Julian saw her fist flying at him, tried in vain to dodge it. A galaxy exploded in his head. He was slung around, flailed with his arms, fought for control. Dana came flying after him. The second blow broke his nose. He should have put on a helmet, bloody idiot, too late. Red and black mist floated in front of his eyes. He just managed to grab on to one of the hand-grips along the walls and kicked at random, hit Dana’s helmet and sent her flying round in circles.

‘What have you done with Lynn?’ he shouted. ‘What have you done with my daughter?’

His hatred exploded. Again he kicked, his hand gripping the butt of his gun. Dana was whirled around, turned upside down, caught herself, launched at him and grabbed him by the shoulders. A moment later he flew off. Like a pinball he touched one side of the tunnel, then the other, and was carried out of the airlock.

Where was Haskin? Where was the dozy standby crew?

Lawrence was reaching for the control panel. She wanted to seal the airlock, to lock him out. What was her plan? Did she want to get out? What for? What did she want to do out there?

Clear off?

The blood was clotting in his nose, his head was swinging like a bell when he dashed back into the airlock at the last minute and managed to grab her arm. Lawrence’s fingers couldn’t reach the closing mechanism. Without letting go of her, and with blows drumming down on him from her free hand, he pushed her back. They started spinning and collided against the outside portal. For a moment, through the porthole, Julian saw the brightly lit opposite side of the enormous ring module, the cables ending in the middle, only minutes to go till the cabin arrived – and then Lawrence rammed her knee into his stomach.

He felt a wave of nausea, he couldn’t breathe. He let go of her arm and she hurled him against the wall, where he managed to grab onto a strut. Lawrence was floating upright by the outer portal, turned round and faced him. Her right hand wandered to her thigh and took something out of a sheath, a flat thing that looked like a pistol.

He had lost.

As in a stupor, Julian leaned his head to one side. It couldn’t, mustn’t end like this! His glance fell on a flap in the wall beside him. It took him a second to remember what it did, or more precisely what lay behind it, and then it came to him.

He wasn’t securely fastened. He was just holding on with sheer muscle power, and the bulkhead to the torus was open. He wasn’t even wearing a helmet.

To hell with it!

Holding tightly on to the bar, he pulled up the flap. A bright red handle became visible. Dana’s eyes behind the visor widened as she worked out what he was planning. The barrel of her gun came flying up, but not fast enough. He pulled hard on the handle and brought it straight down.

Held his breath.

With a deafening crash the charges in the fixing pins went up and blew the bulkhead from its mooring. Tumbling over and over it whirled into open space, and at the same moment the suction began, a wailing, murderous storm, as the air flowed out, pulling Dana out of the airlock with it. Julian clung to the metal pole with both hands. More air streamed out of the torus, a hurricane now. That moment he realised all passageways to the adjacent corridors would close automatically, and he was unprotected, not even wearing a helmet. If he didn’t make it out of the tunnel in the next few seconds and close the internal bulkhead, he would die in the vacuum, so he gritted his teeth, tensed his muscles and tried to crawl his way back inside.

His fingers started sliding from the rail.

He panicked. He couldn’t let go, but the hurricane was pulling at him, and most particularly it was pulling his leg. He turned his head and saw Dana Lawrence gripping onto one of his boots. The suction intensified, but she wouldn’t let go, she hung horizontal in the roaring inferno, tried to aim her gun.

She pointed it at him.

Tiny muzzle, black.

Death.

And suddenly he’d just had enough of the bloody woman. His rage, his fear, everything turned into pure strength.

‘This is my space station,’ he yelled. ‘Now get out!’

And he kicked.

His boot crashed against her helmet. Lawrence’s fingers slipped away. In a split second she had been swept outside, into the centre of the torus, and even then she kept her gun pointed at him, took aim, and Julian waited for the end.

Her body passed the cable.

For a moment he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Lawrence was flying in two directions at once. More precisely, her shoulder, part of her torso and the right arm holding the gun had separated themselves from the rest.

Because direct contact with the cable can cost you a body-part in a fraction of a second. You must bear in mind that it’s thinner than a razor-blade, but incredibly hard.

His own words, down on the Isla de las Estrellas.

The storm raged around him. With an extreme effort of strength he pulled his way further along the rail, without any illusions of his own survival. He wasn’t going to make it. He couldn’t make it. His lungs hurt, his eyes watered, his head thumped like a jackhammer.

Lynn, he thought. My God, Lynn.

A figure appeared in his field of vision, wearing a helmet, secured with a safety-line. Someone else. Hands grabbed him and pulled him back into the shelter of the torus. Gripped him tightly. The interior bulkhead slid shut.

Haskin.

Stars. Like dust.

Lynn is far away, far, far away. The spaceship silently ploughs the timeless, glittering night, an enclave of peace and refuge. When she briefly regains consciousness, she merely wonders why the bomb hasn’t gone off, but perhaps she just hasn’t been travelling for long enough. She vaguely remembers a plan she had to leave the mini-nuke in the habitation module and return to the OSS in the landing unit, to save herself.

Landing unit. Uning landit.

Mini-nuke. Nuki-Duke. Muki-Nuki-Duki, Mini-Something-Something.

Bruce Dern in Silent Running.

Great film. And at the end: Boooooommmmmm!

No, she’ll stay here. And anyway, she’s out of strength. So many things have gone wrong. Sorry, Julian. Didn’t we want to go to the Moon? How is work going at the Stellar Island Hotel? What? Oh, shit, it’s not finished, that’s it, she knew it, she always knew, it’s not finished! It will never be finished. Never, never, never!

Cold.

The little robot watering the flowers with Bruce Dern. He’s sweet. On that platform in space, the last plants are on it before Dern blows himself up, and then there’s a song by that eco-trollop, Joan Baez, Julian says that every time he hears her he has the feeling somebody’s chiselling his head open, and she messes up the whole great finale with her hysterical soprano.

‘Lynn?’

There he is.

‘Please answer! Lynn! Lynn!’

Oh! Is he crying? Why? Her fault? Did she do something wrong?

Don’t cry, Julian. Come on, let’s look at another one of those ropy old movies. Armageddon. No, he doesn’t like that one, everything about it’s wrong, he says, there’s too much wrong, so how about Ed Wood, Plan 9 from Outer Space, or how about It Came from Outer Space? Come on, that one’s cool! Jack Arnold, the old fairy-tale uncle. Always good for a joke or a horror story. The extraterrestrials with the big brains. That’s what they really look like.

Really? Nonsense. They don’t!

Do so too!

Daddy! Tim doesn’t think they look like that.

‘Lynn!’

Coming. I’m coming, Daddy.

I’m there.