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* * *
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.
31 May 2025
MINI-NUKE
Callisto, The Moon
Finn O’Keefe closed his eyes. He was no coward. And the absence of other human beings certainly didn’t scare him. He had discovered years ago how calm and agreeable his own company could be, and had experienced many wonderful moments of solitude with nothing above him but the sky and the cries of seagulls riding the salty west winds, scanning the sea for tell-tale signs of glistening backs. The only time he ever experienced loneliness, solitude’s desperate sister, was in crowded places. For this reason, the Moon was completely to his taste, despite having so far failed to have any spiritual effect on him. It was easy to be alone here: all you had to do was go behind a hill, switch yourself off from the radio-wave chatter and pretend the others didn’t even exist.
Now, on the flight to the Peary Base, his self-deception was revealed. It was laughable to think that you could turn your back on the world in the certainty that it was still there, to assume that you could opt back into its incredibly noisy civilisation at any moment. Even in the expanse of the Mojave Desert, in the mountain range of the Himalayas, or in the perpetual ice, you would still be sharing the planet with thinking beings, a thought which gave solitude a comfortable foundation.
But the Moon was lonely.
Banished from Gaia’s protective body, cut off from all communication and from the whole of humanity, it had become clear to him during the two hours they had been en route that Luna placed no value on Homo sapiens. Never before had he felt so ignored and devoid of importance. The hotel, gone to ruin. Peary Base, no longer a certainty. The plateaux and mountain ranges all around them suddenly seemed hostile – no, not even that, because hostility would mean they were acknowledged here. But in the context of what religious people defined as Creation, the human race clearly had less significance than a microbe under a skirting board. If one took Luna to be exemplary of the trillions of galaxies in the visible cosmos, it became clear that all of this had not been made for humans – if it had been made at all.
He suddenly found comfort in the group and was thankful for every word that was spoken. And even though he hadn’t known Miranda Winter that well, her death felt like a personal tragedy, because just a few centimetres would have been enough to prevent it. She might have driven her beloved Louis around the bend, named her breasts, and believed any old nonsense that dried-up old Hollywood divas like Olinda Brannigan deduced from tarot cards and tea leaves; but the way she saw herself, her resolutely cheerful determination not to let anything or anyone destroy her good mood, the sublime in the ridiculous, he had admired all of that about her, and possibly even loved it a little too. He wondered whether he had ever been as honest in his arrogance as Miranda Winter had been in her simplicity.
His gaze wandered over to Lynn Orley.
What had happened to her?
The living dead. It was as though she had been erased. Nina had mentioned some kind of shock to Deputy Commander Wachowski, but she seemed to be working her way through self-destruction programme; she hadn’t spoken a single word since Miranda’s death. There was hardly anything to indicate that she was even aware of her surroundings. Everything—
* * *
—had vanished into the event horizon; nothing could make its way out.
She had become a black hole.
And yet, sitting in the depths of the black hole, she found herself capable of following the echoes of her thoughts. This was unusual for a Hawking-like black hole. Something wasn’t right. If she really had fallen into her collapsed core and ended up as a singularity, this would also have meant the end of all cognition. Instead, she had made her way to somewhere. There was certainly no other way to explain the fact that she was still thinking and making speculations, although she had to admit she would probably be doing better if certain green tablets hadn’t been burned when—
* * *
—with the destruction of the hotel, any hope of a message from Hanna had been erased. If he was still able to send out messages, that was.
By now, with the chaotic evening on her mind, Dana was having doubts about this. Was a little pessimism advisable? After all, anything could have happened on Aristarchus. Maybe – although of course without writing Hanna off right away – she should confront the possibility of taking things into her own hands. Her cover hadn’t been blown yet, and her avowed opponent didn’t seem aware of anything, not even herself. All the others trusted her. Even Tim, who—
* * *
—was in increasing despair about how to fairly distribute his worries. Worries for Amber, for Julian (more than he would like to admit), for Lynn and all the rest in the shuttle, and the others wherever they were at that moment; worries as to the limit of his own capacity for suffering, one endless round of anxiety. After flying for more than two hours they had to be nearing the base by now, but they still hadn’t been able to establish contact. Dana had put it down to the tiresome satellite problem, and said they would have a connection as soon as they came into the transmission area. Tim’s worry-list expanded to include the horror of a deserted and somehow destroyed base. The time crept by, or was it racing? The Moon offered no reference points for human perceptions of the passing of time; his species’ timekeeping had absurd continuance only within the enclave of the Callisto, while all around them there was no time, and they would never arrive anywhere ever again.
And as the horror of the vision, fed by his torturously brooding imagination, threatened to overpower him—
* * *
—four words and a yawn provided the solution.
‘Tommy Wachowski. Peary Base.’
‘Peary Base, this is Callisto. We’re coming in for landing. Request permission to land in around ten minutes.’
‘A social visit?’ Wachowski asked sleepily. ‘Heavens. Do you know how late it is? I just hope we’ve cleaned up and cleared away the bottles.’
‘This is no time for jokes,’ said Nina.
‘Just a moment.’ Wachowski’s tone changed in a flash. ‘Landing field 7. Do you need assistance?’
‘We’re okay. One injured, not life-threatening, and one person in shock.’
‘Why aren’t you flying to Gaia?’
‘We’ve come from there. There was a fire. Gaia has been destroyed, but there are other reasons why we can’t go back to Vallis Alpina.’
‘God! What’s happened?’
‘Tommy.’ Dana tuned in. ‘We’ll tell you the details later, okay? We have a lot to report and a great deal more to process. But right now we’re just happy to be able to land.’
Wachowski fell silent for a moment.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll get everything ready here. See you soon.’
American Mining Station, Sinus Iridum
Hanna allowed himself a moment of rest, stretching out and tilting his head back. Despite veering too far north-west, he had nearly made it. As long as he kept up the pace he would be there very soon. His hunch that the others were either dead or severely limited in their transport capabilities had turned into a certainty. They could have caught him up in no time with a rover, but no one had appeared.
His head felt as though it were stuffed with cotton wool, and he was struggling against light dizziness and nausea. He started to walk again. Within a quarter of an hour, he reached the station. Unlike Peary Base, its design was entirely celestial: a large, regolith-covered igloo, connected to cylindrical, pressurised insectoids, a U-formation of spherical tank depots and hangars framing a landing field, bordered by the railhead with its main and siding tracks. Steps and elevators led up to the tracks, freight trains – basic flatbed wagons coupled together – dozed ahead of their next journey. To the side of the landing field, two dozen spiders, frozen and motionless, waited for the command to deployment. Two more had taken up position right next to the rail track and were loading one of the trains with spherical tanks, while a third, fully laden, was on the approach. The plant seemed to be undergoing some development, and Hanna noticed that the hangars, depots and the igloo-shaped habitat were resting on caterpillar tracks. As soon as the zone had been fully processed, the entire station would move on. The visibility was much better here, even though a thin veil of dust hung over everything. Harsh, bright sunlight was reflected back by the crystalline facets of the suspended particles, creating an oppressive, post-nuclear-disaster mood. A world of machines.