by Gary Gibson
They climbed back into their seats while Lester first separated the lunar lander, then spun the command and service modules together through a hundred and eighty degrees to rejoin with the lander via the docking hatch. Once the air pressure had balanced, he opened up the docking tunnel to the lander and pulled himself through, returning a few minutes later.
‘Once we’re in lunar orbit, we’ll separate the lander again and it’ll take us all down to the surface of the Moon,’ he explained to Saul and Mitchell. ‘Any time you want to rest, or need the extra elbow space, you can head through to the lander. There are some sleeping bags there you can hook up to the bulkheads.’
‘I’ve decided,’ announced Saul, ‘that if I live through the next couple of days, I’m never wearing clothes again. Wearing that damn suit put me off them for life.’
He floated at a ninety-degree angle to Mitchell inside the lander, his brain tissues liberally soaked in barbiturates Amy had provided him with from her medical kit. Their pilot and co-pilot were still in the command module, talking with the crew of the last VASIMR to lift off. Almost every surface in the lander was covered in banks of toggle switches and dials, leaving Saul terrified of bumping into any of them.
‘It’s not so bad, really,’ said Mitchell. ‘At least not when you think about what explorers had to cope with in previous centuries, like starvation, scurvy, dehydration. At least Armstrong didn’t have to worry about getting a spear through his chest when he landed on the Moon.’
‘I guess,’ Saul conceded, then peered back through into the command module, where he could just see the top of Amy’s and Lester’s heads. ‘Do we know what’s happening back home?’
‘The feed reports are getting pretty confused.’ Mitchell glanced towards Lester and Amy, and dropped his voice. ‘You ought to know, one of the VASIMRs didn’t make it into orbit.’
‘What happened?’
‘Fuel-line break. Might be due to the tremors, or maybe because everything was so rushed. Ginny was on board, so Lester and Amy are having a hard time of it. You see, Ginny was their niece.’
‘Shit.’
‘Not that you could really tell. They’re so good at keeping things buttoned up.’
‘Well, thanks, I guess, for letting me know.’
&lsoLester also grabbed some public feeds from back home, and . . . well,’ he shrugged. ‘I guess you’d better see for yourself.’
Most of what Saul then received from Mitchell, a moment later, consisted of amateur footage recorded either on witnesses’ contacts or handheld video recorders. All featured bright twists of light that danced through city streets, reducing them to dust within seconds. The view from hovering camera-drones showed the same twists of light roaming across suburbs and crowded cities, leaving nothing in their path but dense choking clouds of dust rising above a grey and featureless landscape. Dense conurbations, filled with people and traffic and homes, disappeared in an instant. Other video segments showed the same disaster happening to forests, grassy mountain slopes and equatorial jungles, the soil turned to lifeless grey ash that billowed up to blot out the sun. Yet another segment showed the same twists of light dancing around a growth, like so many glowing snowflakes.
The next time he looked at Mitchell, Saul felt like he’d aged another decade. ‘I don’t know if I really believed what was happening, until now.’
‘You wouldn’t have any trouble believing it if you were still stuck down below there,’ remarked Mitchell.
‘Look . . .’ Saul let out a sigh. ‘We’re not going to get too many chances like this to talk about what we’re actually intending to do once we reach Copernicus or the Lunar Array. Getting past whatever security operation is still running up there is going to be one of our biggest priorities.’
‘Agreed,’ said Mitchell.
‘But the real priority is triggering an Array-wide shutdown. And for that I still need your help.’
Mitchell threw him an appraising look. ‘I got the impression earlier that you didn’t need anyone else.’
‘I can trigger a shutdown on my own, sure, but only once the Lunar Array’s security systems fall out of contact with Florida. I don’t know how much time that’s going to leave either one of us to set the shutdown in motion. For all I know, it might not be anywhere near long enough. But if we had a second code, it might make all the difference.’
‘Except,’ said Mitchell, ‘you don’t have a second code.’
‘No, but we need to head for the Lunar ASI offices before any code at all can be activated. While we’re there, it might be worth scanning through the servers to see if we can find any kind of information that might help us.’
‘That’s a seriously long shot,’ said Mitchell, looking unconvinced.
‘Better than no shot,’ Saul replied. ‘A little while ago,’ he said, ‘I had the feeling that maybe you weren’t so keen on helping me with this.’
Mitchell hesitated. &lsuoThe only thing that makes me hesitate is knowing I’d be complicit in something that would make people revile the pair of us for a thousand years, if they ever learned what we’d done.’
‘You think I don’t know that?’ Saul snapped. ‘Or that it hasn’t been on my mind every single second since it first occurred to me? If you know a better way to stop the rest of the human race from extinction, I’m fucking desperate to hear it. Really, truly desperate. If there was any other way—’
‘Saul,’ Mitchell put up a hand, ‘I get it. I understand.’
‘Just so I know I can count on you.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Mitchell, flashing him a grin full of bright, sharp teeth.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Translunar Space, 10 February 2235
Saul climbed into one of the sleeping bags in the lander, and blacked out more than just fell asleep. He woke several hours later, groggy and bedevilled by a thousand aches and pains, his sleeping bag twisted slightly where it had been Velcroed to a bulkhead. He saw Mitchell, snoring loudly, wrapped in another sleeping bag across the lander.
Saul swallowed to get rid of the dry, gummy taste in his mouth, and spent the next few minutes figuring out how to unzip himself from the bag and its Velcro straps. He then kicked himself through to the command module, finding Lester and Amy still at their stations.
‘Still alive?’ asked Amy, glancing up at him.
‘Barely,’ Saul mumbled. ‘What’s the latest?’
‘See for yourself,’ suggested Lester, without turning.
A second or two later, Saul found himself watching live satellite feeds of Europe and Africa. He could just make out the coasts of Morocco and South Africa, and saw that both landmasses had become almost entirely hidden under an impenetrable grey haze. Occasional streaks of light chased each other through the ashen murk, come and gone so quickly that they almost didn’t register.
Saul scanned through more feeds and saw that, although the same haze had not yet crossed the Atlantic to North America’s eastern seaboard, it could nonetheless be seen approaching from the other direction, spreading across the Bering Straits, and reaching as far as the northern tip of Alaska.
He inhaled loudly through his nose, fighting off a surge of bile that rose into the back of his throat. A billion years of evolution, and millennia of human history, all wiped out of existence in the course of just a few days. It defied comprehension. Olivia and Jeff came to mind in that moment, and he prayed they had managed to shut down the Inuvik gate in time.
‘Try not to throw up, son,’ said Lester. ‘It’s more dangerous than you think.’
‘I won’t,’ Saul gasped, tasting sour phlegm. He floated, eyes shut, with one hand gripping the back of Lester’s seat.
‘He’ll be fine,’ Amy muttered. ‘Barbiturates’ll keep him from puking too bad.’
‘Saul, did you notice anything weird?’ asked Lester. ‘About the distribution of those clouds, I mean.’
Saul forced himself to open his eyes again, despite a rush of dizziness. ‘Weird in what way?’
‘Worst thing,’ Amy muttered, ‘is not even knowing what started it all.’
‘How much did Jeff tell you about the growths?’ asked Saul.
‘Well.’ Lester squinted, as if uncomfortable with the subject, ‘more than we wanted to hear, to be honest. Mainly he talked about some whole big network of CTC gates leading all over the galaxy. He talked about so much stuff it was kind of hard to take a lot of it on board.’
‘Did he tell you about stealing confidential files from a secret research platform out at Tau Ceti?’
‘He did, yes.’ Lester nodded. ‘But what you just said there is about the sum of what he told us.’
‘We only got the essential details,’ Amy added. ‘But Olivia did say you had copies of the files. Did you bring them with you?’
‘I did. They’re all the proof you need. Here they are.’
Their expressions glazed over for several seconds, as they each received their own copies of the stolen files.
‘There’s a lot of stuff there,’ Saul warned them. ‘It took me a good few hours just to skim through the document abstracts. Jeff wanted to broadcast it all to the world, but it looks like he ended up on the run instead.’
‘Not that there’s much of a world left to broadcast it to,’ Amy said quietly.
‘A couple of days ago I was on Newton,’ said Saul. ‘The military have been moving thir people through, and staging an armed takeover of the colonies. They’re desperate to suppress any evidence that the growths reaching Earth was the result of human error.’
‘Then why are you giving this to us?’ asked Lester, refocusing his gaze on Saul.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Lester,’ said Amy, her tone sharply admonishing, ‘they want the colonists to know what happened. That’s what Olivia said, remember? And damn right, too.’
‘You can carry the files in your contacts through to whichever colony you head for,’ said Saul. ‘Same for the rest of your people on the VASIMRs. Do you have secure links you can use to forward those files to the rest of your people?’
‘Sure do,’ said Amy. ‘Matter of fact, I’m doing it right now.’
‘We’re getting news back from some of the others who’ve already got to the Lunar Array,’ said Lester. ‘They got detained at first, but then they were allowed through to Da Vinci, along with almost everyone from Copernicus City. From what we’re hearing, it looks like most of whoever they want to bring through from Earth is already through.’ His expression became troubled. ‘But I can’t stop thinking about those millions of refugees back in Florida. It makes no damn sense, just leaving them there to die like that. Couldn’t they at least save some of them?’
‘I don’t know,’ Saul admitted.
‘Oh, it makes sense, all right,’ said Amy, ‘in a twisted, callous kind of way. The colonies haven’t been around all that long, and most of them can only sustain small populations, as it is – especially places like Newton, with the sealed biomes. They’d be hard pushed to cope with even a small increase in their populations.’
‘You’re sure of that?’ Saul asked.
‘Think about it,’ she said, her tone flat. ‘It’s what they call a cold equation. There just isn’t enough food, water and air to go round. It’s the logic of the lifeboat: if you’ve got a lifeboat big enough for six people but seven hundred are drowning all around you, there’s no way you can get more than a tiny fraction of that number into the lifeboat without sinking it and drowning everyone.’
She reached over the back of her chair to touch Saul’s arm. ‘You did a good thing getting those files here, son. There’s nothing we can do for those people back there, much as it makes me sick to admit it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do our damnedest to make sure the ones responsible for all this will pay for what they’ve done.’
Saul came to a decision and pulled himself into the seat directly behind Amy’s. ‘There’s something I need to tell you both. When we get to the Moon, I’m going to try and shut the Array down – collapse every one of the wormholes.’
‘St it down?’ said Lester, a confused look on his face. ‘Is that even possible?’
‘Maybe Lester and Amy have got enough on their plates right now,’ interrupted Mitchell, pulling himself through from the lander.
Saul jerked his head around in surprise. ‘You’re awake.’
‘No,’ insisted Amy, ‘I want to hear what Saul has to say.’
Saul turned back to her. ‘Take a look at the files I just sent you. Particularly the video sequences listed under “Copernicus”.’
Amy stared sideways at a bulkhead, as Mitchell floated down to join them, with a look of disapproval on his face. ‘Okay, I’ve got it.’ She frowned. ‘Hey, it looks like—’
‘Like something’s completely devastated the entire city. Is that what you’re seeing?’
She stared in silence at the bulkhead for several more seconds. ‘Shit,’ she said at length. ‘That’s just about right.’
‘Whatever’s about to happen on Earth is going to happen to Copernicus as well, and it’s going to be soon. So I need to shut the gates down before the same thing can happen to the colonies. I’m telling you this so you’ll understand why you can’t hang around once we get up there. You have to find your way through a gate as soon as possible, or you’ll be stranded.’
‘How sure are you that you need to do this?’ Lester demanded.
‘All I know,’ Saul said truthfully, ‘is that I’ve seen what’s going to happen to the Moon, and the only way it could have got there is via the Array.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Lester. ‘It had to have come through the Array on the way to Earth, right? Maybe they had more of those artefacts stored up there in Copernicus, somewhere. Maybe they caused it?’
‘He’s got a point,’ said Mitchell. ‘You can’t deny it’s a possibility.’
‘Jesus, Mitch,’ Saul rounded on him, ‘don’t you think you’re clutching at straws?’
‘But it’s at least a possibility,’ said Lester, his expression pained.
Amy reached out and touched her husband’s shoulder. ‘No, Lester, what Saul’s saying makes sense. We can’t put our hope on a distant possibility. We have to think for the rest of the human race.’
‘Not all of our people have made a landing yet,’ Lester insisted, suddenly looking all of his years. ‘We already lost Ginny. What if the rest of them couldn’t get through in time?’
‘I’ve seen what’s happening back home – just like you have,’ she said, her voice gentle now. ‘Way I see it, we have a moral obligation to do everything we can to help Saul. I just wish we had a name for the thing causing all of this. Otherwise everything feels so . . .’ She shrugged ‘. . . so random.’
Saul glanced at Mitchell in time to see him shake his head, and push himself back up towards the tunnel leading into the lander.
‘If no more people are being allowed through the Array,’ said Saul, ‘then maybe you’re right, Amy. There’s too many of them for the colonies.’
Amy looked at him with old eyes. ‘Just tell me you don’t want to be the one to have to do this.’
‘I don’t want to be the one to have to do this,’ affirmed Saul, with all the feeling he could muster.
Saul made his way through to the lander, where he found Mitchell waiting.
‘What the hell was all that about?’ Saul demanded. ‘They’ve got every right to know what we’re intending to do.’
‘I just thought they’d been through enough,’ Mitchell replied mildly. ‘
You didn’t really need to tell them you were planning on triggering a shutdown.’
‘They got us this far, they deserve to know.’
‘I don’t know, Saul. Sounded to me more like you were making a confession.’
There was just enough truth in what Mitchell had said to hit home. ‘Listen,’ Saul was angry now, ‘something happened to you that I can’t even begin to understand. I saw the footage of you falling into that pit, then being pulled out of it. I read reports that said you’d died and come back. How is that even possible?’
‘It depends,’ said Mitchell, ‘on your definition of life and death.’
‘Is all of that why you’re acting so different? You said, just before we launched, that none of this was going to be as bad as I might think. What the hell did that mean?’
Mitchell shook his head and sighed. ‘I shouldn’t have said it.’
‘Give me,’ Saul insisted, ‘an explanation.’
‘Look, when they pulled me out of that pit, I was changed. That’s true. I . . . I knew things. Things about the Founder races, about how the network came into existence, where they went to after they disappeared.’
Saul could hardly believe what he was hearing. ‘How?’
‘I don’t know how. I just woke up and it was all there, swirling around inside my head. But when I said what I said back then, I was trying to tell you something for which I seriously doubt there are words – something so far outside of my own experience or that of any other human being that I’m still struggling to comprehend it. Once I do, assuming I ever do, I’ll try and choose my words more carefully. I’m sorry.’
Saul hesitated. After all, his worries stemmed from a single unfinished statement from Donohue, hardly a man he felt he could trust at the best of times. But, then again, something had put Olivia on edge as well.
‘There’s still something you’re not telling me,’ said Saul. ‘I don’t know what, but I’ve been in my job long enough to know when someone’s not being straight with me.’
