27
It cost NASA more to buy off the satellite company whose launch window it appropriated than to charter the HORUS orbiter to lift the propulsion unit to Unity. The hope was to recoup it all and more when the Gaia probe went into orbit around the BDO and pictures started to come in. The news services had placed bids already. So the project directors told the financial managers. None of them had ever thought that First Contact would be mediated by accountants.
This was the mission plan. The manoeuvring unit would rendezvous with Gaia out in the marches of Jupiter, hard-dock and fire its engines to swing the probe on to a path that would take it into polar orbit around the Big Dumb Object. The disc’s spin would bring every part of its surface under the scrutiny of Gala’s sensors.
Eight hours before launch from Unity a fleet of unmanned USAF single-stage-to-orbit freighters launched from Edwards Air Force Base, together with a specialist team in a military shuttle. Revisions had been made to the payload calculations. Extra reaction mass tanks were needed, of a new and more efficient design. None of the multi-national crew of Unity believed this as they watched the delta-vee of the USAF shuttle dock with the Interceptor in its assembly orbit, turn its black refractory belly to the stars and disgorge space workers in exo-skeletons and spider-walking Canada arms from its cargo bay. New and more efficient designs; with stars and bars on their sides, that required military specialists to fit?
The USAF shuttle de-orbited with seconds to spare. Safe distancing thrusters burned blue. The Gaia interceptor moved into launch orbit. At fifty kilometres the main engine lit. The hydrogen flame vanished into the big night. As the interceptor crossed the orbit of Mars it jettisoned the last-minute military fuel tanks and flipped into deceleration mode. This piece of information, alone of all others relating to the flight of the interceptor, passed through a little-known NASA hierarchy directly on to the desk of the President of the United States.
28
Miriam Sondhai told Gaby McAslan that she had a visitor when she returned, elemental and glowing, to the old missionary house. She was most surprised to find T.P. Costello sitting on the creaking leather sofa, drinking Miriam Sondhai’s chai. She had been crazily expecting it to be her sister Reb, come out to Kenya on the same whim that carried her through the rest of her life, to see what Gaby had done with the star tapestry.
Gaby’s ready bag was on the coffee table.
‘Well, now you’ve finished banging the balls off UNECTA’s shiny new peripatetic Executive Director, maybe SkyNet’s new East Africa Correspondent wouldn’t mind earning her grossly inflated salary,’ T.P. said.
‘You’ve been through my things,’ Gaby growled. The bag was badly packed with impractical underwear and few cosmetics. ‘You’ve been fondling my panties, T.P. Costello. Probably sniffing them.’
‘Needs must. I’ve got a job for you.’
‘Send Jake. He’s senior East African Correspondent.’
‘Jake’s sick.’
‘You don’t get sick in this job.’
‘He’s sick,’ T.P. answered. His face was as fixed and unreadable as a Kabuki mask. ‘You have ten minutes to get that football gear off, stop yourself smelling like a trapper’s jockstrap and look like a professional newswoman. Ten minutes, then I’m dragging you as you are to Kenyatta. You’ve a flight to catch. Your passport’s in there too, don’t worry. And a tube of factor eight. You’re going to need it in the Maldives.’
‘The Maldives?’
‘Foa Mulaku’s bubbled up.’
‘You can tell a man packed this bag,’ Gaby said, rummaging in it for shower things. ‘No tampons.’
29
Beyond the reef, the bottom fell away and the water changed from the pale green of inshore where you could see the shadows of the little coral fish cast on the silt to an ultramarine blue of such transparency that you could look over the rail and imagine the blue-on-blue of the deep water hunters, endlessly seeking, a thousand feet down. The SeaCat passed through the gap in the reef and throttled up. The island dwindled to an edge of coral sand and green palms, then to a line of darkness on the sea, then was lost beneath the horizon. The big catamaran had once ferried holiday-makers between the islands of the Seychelles, but UNECTA had chartered it to service its Indian Ocean bases. Now it ferried the world’s media. There were three hundred reporters with their knightly entourages on the catamaran this bright August morning. The bar had never done such good business.
Team SkyNet was on the rear sun-deck, preparing for a satellite link-up with London.
Faraway miked Gaby up, Tembo tried camera angles: ‘not in direct sunlight, your eyes go dark and viewers will not trust you if they cannot see your eyes.’ Gaby looked at the birds flocking and diving above the churned wakes. The sea is one thing, she thought. Unitary. Whole. It would be morning over that part of the one sea that broke around the Point. Dad would be back from his morning walk, Reb would have the espresso maker bubbling on the Aga. The early satellite news would be on as background to their coffee and Marks and Spencer’s brioche. Paddy would be underneath the table, thumping his tail to every word that ended in a ‘y’ sound. Suddenly, shockingly, Gaby would burst from the screen in their morning, live with her news of incredible things in exotic locations. It is one thing, the sea, and it is a big thing. Bigger than anything you can bring to it. No human care can match its transcendent unity. Why fear, then, when all things come out of and return to the sea?
‘I am patching you in now, Gaby,’ Faraway said. She nodded. The voice of Jonathan Cusack, The World This Morning’s anchorman, was whispering in her ear: ‘And now we have on the satellite link our new East Africa Correspondent, Gaby McAslan.’
East Africa Correspondent, Gaby McAslan. Me! Help me!
Tembo gave her a mark. She brushed hair away from her face. The transmit light went and Jonathan Cusack said, ‘So, Gaby, just what is going on out there in the Indian Ocean?’
For a quarter of a second Gaby thought she was going to throw up live on prime-time.
‘Well, Jonathan, I’m on the press boat to East Seven Five, UNECTA’s permanent floating observation platform at the Foa Mulaku object. We should arrive in just over an hour, about one-thirty our time.
‘So what will be happening when you get out there?’ Jonathan Cusack asked, nine thousand miles away. Gaby pushed her hair from her face again. Faraway grimaced and made a throat-cutting gesture with his thumb.
‘To fill in a little background: Foa Mulaku, or, to give it its proper name, the Maldive Ridge Object, was the fourth biological package. It came to rest about six thousand feet down in the waters of the Equatorial Channel. By the time UNECTA located the site, the package had colonized a nine-kilometre radius of sea bed eighty kilometres to the north-east of the island of Gan. What makes the underwater Chaga forms so very different from the terrestrial manifestations is that once they’ve established themselves, they grow upward rather than outward. Foa Mulaku has taken scientists by surprise by coming to its final emergence state much more quickly than predicted -they were originally talking about mid-November, now it’s certain that it will come out of the sea some time in the next few hours.’
‘Can you give us some idea of what we will be seeing?’ Jonathan Cusack asked. I used to fancy him, Gaby thought. He was my number-one media fantasy figure. Now that satin-and-sabres voice is whispering in my ear.