‘That you’d done a pretty good job of digging up a lt of classified information.’
‘I know about the Founder Network and the recovered artefacts, if that’s what you mean. And I also know what happened to
you
.’
The hopper quivered as its wings realigned themselves in preparation for boosting it into the high atmosphere. Somewhere beneath their feet, the engines built up to a noisy rumble, and Saul gripped his armrests as the acceleration pushed them back deep into their seats.
‘What gave you the idea of using the EDP codes?’ Mitchell yelled over the roar.
‘It was the obvious thing to do,’ Saul yelled back. ‘I mean, Jesus, think about what will happen if we don’t shut those gates down.’
‘That depends,’ said Mitchell, ‘on what you think really is happening.’
Saul frowned at him. ‘What?’
Mitchell waved a hand dismissively. ‘Forget it.’
‘Mitchell, I’ve argued this through with two other people, one of them Olivia. In the end, they both decided to help me. So if you want to know how I’m sure it’s the right course of action, then know that I am very,
very
damn sure.’
‘Even if it means having the blood of countless innocents on your hands, once you slam the door shut on all of them?’
Saul felt his face grow hot. ‘I know what the goddamned consequences are. But doing nothing would be a hell of a lot worse, don’t you think?’
Somehow, that had seemed to be the end of any further discussion for the remainder of their journey. Once their craft had levelled out, Saul found himself some quick-heating food in a crew locker and devoured it. He then fell asleep for a while, and dreamed he was back in that car, with Donohue shouting warnings about Mitchell, and woke only when the hopper began its final approach to the Roses’ private spaceport, his body racked by a bone-deep ache.
Little about the spaceport had changed over the years since Saul had last seen it. Two lengthy roads cut their way through scrubby desert, while a hangar complex, looking like yesterday’s vision of the future of space flight, sat next to the point where they converged. He saw several huge VASIMRs mounted on the backs of trucks, while an airstrip ran parallel to one of the roads. A small hotel and several other buildings of much more recent vintage were strung along the side of it. Rail tracks extended towards a launch pad consisting of a strip of blackened concrete, several kilometres distant from the hangar complex. A massive gantry stood in the centre of the launch pad, supporting a full-sized working replica of an ancient Apollo Saturn multi-stage rocket that towered over the landscape. The gantry had been empty the last time Saul had seen it, several years earlier, waiting for the Roses to finish a round of fund-raising with a consortium of billionaire adrenalin-junkies, so that the pair of them could build more rockets.
font face="Times New Roman">He gestured past Mitchell and out the window. ‘I never understood the appeal of going up in one of those things.’
‘Adventure,’ said Mitchell. ‘Doesn’t get much simpler than that.’
‘What’s wrong with VASIMRs, then?’
Mitchell chuckled. ‘Where’s the adventure in that?’
‘You sound like Jeff.’ Saul turned away from the window and let his head drop back against his seat. ‘Did I mention that I never forgave you for talking me into that sub-orbital jump?’
‘I didn’t talk you into it,’ Mitchell reminded him. ‘You just took pity on me after my brother died.’
‘You told me the experience would reaffirm my enthusiasm for life.’
Mitchell shrugged. ‘You sounded pretty enthusiastic to me, at the time. You were screaming all the way down.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m just glad it’s someone else who’ll be flying in that thing, instead of us.’
He glanced sideways at Mitchell and felt a frisson of alarm on seeing the look on his face.
‘We’re going up in a VASIMR, right?’
The corner of Mitchell’s mouth twitched. ‘We would be, except all the seats are taken.’
‘Who by?’
‘The ground control crew and their families. There are maybe a hundred of them, altogether, not including relations – all those responsible for the engineering, fuel supply, onboard systems and general maintenance. The ones that haven’t taken off already are going up as soon as we head up on board the Saturn.’
Before Saul could say anything more, a landing warning flashed, and the hopper began to decelerate hard. He watched buildings hurtle by, and a stretch of black tarmac blurring past, before the hopper’s engines came to a halt and it dropped down, with a gentle thump, next to what looked like some kind of administration building. Sam stood up and pushed open the hatch, letting sunlight spill into the aircraft’s interior.
The air outside tasted gritty, dry and furnace-hot. Saul shielded his eyes with one hand and glanced past the VASIMRs towards the Saturn rocket, clouds of steam now drifting down its sides. Centuries before, men had flown craft just like it all the way to the Moon and back, but the development of the wormhole technology had put paid to almost all of that.
‘Car’s on its way,’ announced the pilot, indicating an open-top vehicle approaching from the administration building.
‘You’ost oing up in one of those?’ Saul gestured towards the VASIMRs.
Sam nodded. ‘Soon as we get lock-in from the orbital powersats, yeah.’
‘I rode in one once before,’ said Saul. ‘It was a pretty bumpy ride.’
Sam shrugged. ‘Sometimes that’s down to the weather conditions. They’ve been taking off from here round the clock, over the past couple of days. The ones parked over there’ll be the last to go up. You know the Saturn’s going to be much, much bumpier, right?’
‘No,’ Saul sighed, as the empty car stopped beside them, ‘I didn’t know that.’
The car wasn’t much more than a glorified golf cart. It carried them past a lone billboard advertising lunar flights, and then a prospective, VASIMR-powered tourist flight to Mars that was now clearly never going to happen. Saul saw a gaggle of men and women in hard hats standing by a VASIMR mounted on the back of an enormous truck that was parked next to one hangar. Their car came to a halt nearby, and one of the men came over, his dark and weather-beaten skin scored with deep wrinkles.
‘Mr Dumont,’ said the man, as they all climbed out, ‘I’m Lester Rose. I believe we met some years ago?’
‘Briefly,’ said Saul, shaking Lester’s hand as he was offered it.
Lester nodded. ‘Well, we’re going to get plenty reacquainted before long, because I’m gonna be one half of your flight crew.’
‘I’m sorry?’ said Saul, not quite able to hide his disbelief.
The old man chuckled. ‘Don’t look so worried. I’m an old hand at this game. Matter of fact, I was one half of the flight-crew on our last three launches, as well.’ He paused, then continued, ‘Jeff told me a lot about you. You two worked together, right?’
‘Yeah,’ Saul nodded, ‘although it was a long time ago.’
Lester’s expression became serious. ‘Jeff’s told me a lot of things, since he got in touch. I know what I heard on the news feeds, but’ – he glanced at the landscape around them, and shook his head slowly – ‘I’ll be honest with you, if it wasn’t for what I’ve seen on the news I’d have a hard time believing one damn word he told me. But Jeff’s a good man, so I know he ain’t going to lie to me.’
‘So if you’re one half of the flight crew,’ asked Saul, ‘who’s the other half?’
‘That’d be my wife, Amy,’ Lester replied. ‘She’s an engineer and pilot, and a good one, too, knows every ship we own inside and out.’ He turned to the hopper pilot. ‘Sam, you should get over to Bay Fifteen, give Arkady a hand. There’s something fishy going on with the fuel-gauge readings on bird number five.’
‘Sure thing.’ Sam headed over to the truck and began talking to one of the men standing nearby.
‘In case I don’t get the chance later,’ Mitchell said to Lester, ‘I want to thank you for holding the launch back for us. It means a lot to me.’
Lester shook his head. ‘Way I see it, we might all owe Jeff our lives. So if he wants us to give you a ride up, we’ll give you a ride up.’ His expression became uncertain. ‘It’s really going to be as bad as he says?’
‘Yes,’ said Saul, ‘it’s really going to be that bad.’
‘Right.’ Lester sniffed, staring out towards the horizon for a moment. ‘You know, a couple of generations back, a girl in my family went off to live on a mountain for a year with some people who all reckoned the end of the world was coming. Shaved her head, got herself pregnant, then a solar eclipse came and went, and she returned back down the mountain and found the world was still there. Everyone pretended it never happened, so she went on and got a regular job and never did anything crazy ever again. I can’t imagine how foolish she must have felt, but there’s a tiny part of me thinks maybe this is all the same kind of situation, and we’re all going to fly up there and find the world isn’t going away, and we’re all going to come home again feeling foolish. Do you know what I mean?’
‘If I thought shaving my head and going to live on a mountain might help things to come out any other way,’ said Saul, ‘I’d be reaching for the razor right now.’
Lester nodded with a look of inexpressible sadness. ‘Come on,’ he said, and led them through the hangar towards a side-office. ‘I’ll introduce you to Amy.’
Amy Rose proved to be an equally leather-skinned old person in her eighties, who had once worked on the early construction of Kepler’s biomes, and even helped carry out course adjustments on board one of the CTC-gate-carrying starships. When she wasn’t reminding Saul and Mitchell that she was too busy to retire, she was airing her political convictions.
‘We fucked ’em over every which way for no good reason,’ she said, when Saul described the invasion of Sophia he’d witnessed. ‘The colonies, that is. Should’a shared the technology with the Sphere nations a long time ago.’
‘Amy,’ intervened Lester, a note of warning in his voice, but this only earned him a scowl from his wife.
‘No,
Lester
,’ she continued, scowling, ‘long as they could control all the gate traffic, they reckoned they could keep the colonies under their thumb. The human race could have expanded a lot further out into the galaxy by now, if it weren’t for that kind of shortsighted thinking. That’s how they’ve maintained the same historical imbalance between rich and poor, even over light-years. Enough to make you sick.’ She shook her head with evident disgust.
‘When are we going up?’ asked Saul.
‘First thing tomorrow morning,’ replied Amy.
Ice trickled through Saul’s veins. ‘That soon?’
‘That soon,’ Amy echoed. ‘In the meantime, you look like you could use a night’s sleep.’
They put Saul up in a hotel next to the runway, where he woke early the next morning, still feeling bruised and sore and tired. Mitchell had already departed the room he’d taken next door to Saul’s own, and so Saul ate alone in the hotel’s tiny restaurant, staring out across the desert landscape towards the Saturn rocket a few kilometres distant.
Lester picked him up just before eight, driving him to another building nearby that turned out to contain a suite of changing rooms, the walls lined with sportswear-model spacesuits. He found Mitchell there, following Amy’s detailed instructions and by that time already halfway into donning his own suit.
Amy waved Saul over to join them, ordering him to strip down before showing him how to put on a pair of rubber-lined long johns studded with flexible microscopic monitors. Following that, he clambered inside one of the racked spacesuits, which proved to be a one-piece garment entered through a diagonal zip running from the crotch all the way up to one shoulder. A how-to, uploaded to his contacts, described the function of each piece of equipment his suit contained in interminable detail, before guiding him through a full systems check that required him to put on a helmet and pressurize the suit to check for potential leaks or any other problems. Once he had the helmet on, icons appeared along the bottom of its curved interior surface, each bearing a name: Saul, Amy, Mitchell and Lester.
‘Jesus,’ exclaimed Amy, when she noticed Saul struggling to remove his helmet a few minutes later. ‘Trust an amateur.’ With a sorrowful look, she helped him unlock it from his suit’s neck ring.
‘How does the suit feel?’ she asked.
‘Itchy,’ Saul replied. ‘Not very easy to move.’
‘Believe me, it’ll be harder once we get to the lunar surface, but we’ll be there to guide you along the way.’ She turned and snapped her fingers at Mitchell, until she had his attention, too. ‘Didn’t you say Saul’s been up in space before?’
‘Just a sub-orb jump,’ Mitchell replied, still adjusting the fabric hood he had pulled over his head.
‘Right,’ Amy turned back to Saul, ‘well, this time it’s going to be a little different. We’re launching way ahead of schedule as it is, which means you need to be ready for anything.’
‘Like what?’
Mitchell glanced across at him. ‘Like when we jumped,’ he explained. ‘You have to pee inside your suit, remember?’
‘Somehow I’d managed to wipe that detail from my mind,’ Saul grumbled. ‘What about, uh, everything else?’