‘And where’s Carl?’
‘He’s unconscious. I knocked him out and tied him to the seats.’
‘You’re a hero,’ cried Momoka, delighted. ‘You know that? You’re a goddamn hero!’
‘Of course, what else? I’m a hero in a spaceship that’s going incredibly fast, with no idea of how to fly the stupid thing. That is, I’m getting the hang of it now. Turning round, getting down and landing, not so sure about.’
‘Can you get through to the hotel?’ asked Julian.
‘Don’t think so. Too far away, too many mountains. I’m over fifteen kilometres up, to be quite honest I’m starting to feel something like vertigo. And I don’t know how much gas I’ve got left.’
‘Fine, no problem. I’ll help. Just stay up there for the time being, because of the radio connection.’
‘The LPCS has failed, right?’
‘Sabotage, if you ask me. Did Carl actually say anything to you?’
‘I didn’t give him much of a chance to say anything.’
‘Oh, my hero!’
‘Do you know your position?’
‘Fifty degrees west, forty-six degrees north. On the right there’s a crater plateau, with mountains attached to it.’
‘Can you give me some kind of name?’
‘Wait a second: Montes Jura.’
‘Very good. Listen, Warren, you’ve got to—’
Ganymede
Locatelli listened carefully to Julian’s instructions. As he did so, he found himself suspecting that his host didn’t know what needed to be done down to the last detail either, but definitely had more of a notion about how to fly a Hornet shuttle than he did himself. For example, he knew how to take a bend. Locatelli would have adjusted the jets individually, and plunged to his death as a result. Whereas in fact it was relatively simple, if you bore in mind simple things like turning off the automatic course programming and switched to manual.
‘Keep to the right, fly east, towards the Montes Jura, and then make a big hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and head south again.’
‘I’m with you.’
‘Not even nearly. Don’t make any tight turns, okay? Make sure they’re wide. You’re going at 1200 kilometres an hour!’
Locatelli did as he was told. Perhaps he was an excessively obedient pupil, because the bend turned into an extended sightseeing tour of the landscape. When he had turned the Ganymede, he found himself to the west of forty degrees longitude, with the jagged agglomeration of the Jurassic mountains below him, arranged in a circle around a vast bay. The bay was called Sinus Iridum and adjoined the Mare Ibrium, and somehow the name struck him as familiar. Then he remembered. Sinus Iridum was the apple of discord that sparked the Moon crisis in 2024. From the windows of the cockpit he had a breathtaking view. Hardly anywhere else was the illusion of land and sea so perfect, all that was missing was a blue glow on the velvet basalt base of the Mare Ibrium. It looked particularly velvety here, most of all where it abutted the south-western foothills of the mountains.
‘Where are you?’ asked Julian.
‘Southern half of Sinus Iridum. There’s a spit of land ahead of me. Cape Hera-clides. Shall I go lower? Then I won’t have such a long journey down later on.’
‘Do that. We’ll just check how long the connection lasts.’
‘Fine. As soon as it goes, I’ll climb again.’
‘It’ll get more stable the closer you get, anyway.’
Locatelli hesitated. Going lower, fine. Perhaps it would be even better to cut back the speed a bit. Not much, just enough to take it below 1000 kilometres an hour. What he was doing wasn’t even slightly comparable to a flight through the Earth’s atmosphere, where you had to battle with air levels and turbulence, but hours upon hours in aeroplanes had got him used to lengthy landings, so he decelerated and began to drop.
The Ganymede plummeted like a stone towards the ground.
What had he done?
The shuttle settled at an angle. Noise flooded the interior, the tortured wails of over-extended technology.
‘Julian,’ he cried. ‘I’ve fucked up!’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’m crashing!’
‘What have you done? Tell me what you’ve done!’
Locatelli’s hands fluttered over the controls, uncertain about which fields they should press, which switches they should use.
‘I think I’ve got speed and altitude regulation mixed up.’
‘Okay. But don’t lose your head!’
‘I’m not losing my head!’ yelled Locatelli, about to lose his head.
‘Do the following. Just go—’
The line went dead. Shit, shit, shit! Fingers clawed, he crouched over the console. He didn’t know what to do, but to do nothing would mean certain death, so he had to do something, but what?
He tried to balance out his crooked angle with a counter-thrust.
The shuttle roared like a giant wounded animal, started reeling violently and tilted to the other side. A moment later it lurched so hard that Locatelli was afraid it would break into a thousand pieces. He looked helplessly in all directions, turned his head instinctively—
Carl Hanna was staring at him.
Hanna, whose fault it all was. Under any other circumstances Locatelli would have got up, smacked him one and given him valuable advice about how to treat your holiday acquaintances, but that was out of the question right now. He saw that the Canadian was starting to tug like mad on his fetters, ignored him and bent over the console again. The shuttle was rapidly losing velocity, and tilting still further. Locatelli decided not to worry about the plunge for the time being, and instead to concentrate on stabilising his position, but the only result of his efforts was that he suddenly had no power over the controls.
‘Warren, you—’
Hanna shouted something.
‘—you’ve gone into automatic! You’ve got to—’
Why didn’t that idiot just keep his trap shut?
‘—you’re out of manual! Warren, damn it to hell! Untie me.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘We’re both going to die!’
Locatelli poked stubbornly around in the main menu. The altitude meter was counting down worryingly quickly, 5.0 – 4.8 – 4.6, they were hurtling towards the lunar ground like a meteor. A few moments before, in his excitement, he must have pressed something, he must have activated some function that had effectively disem-powered him and stripped him of access to any kind of navigation. Now it looked as if he could do whatever he liked, and it would have not the slightest influence on the behaviour of the Ganymede.
‘Warren!’
Who was that this time?
Try and remember, do what you did before. What worked so well under Julian’s instructions. Turn off automatic pilot, switch to manual.
But how? How?
‘Release me, Warren!’
Why wasn’t it working this time? Bloody touchscreen! What kind of a crappy cockpit was it? Nothing but virtual fields, unfamiliar electronic landscapes, cryptic symbols instead of solid rocker switches with sensible inscriptions like HELLO, WARREN, TURN ME THE OTHER WAY AND IT’LL ALL BE FINE.
‘We’re going to die, Warren! That won’t do anybody any good. You can’t want that!’
‘Forget it, asshole.’
‘I won’t hurt you, you hear me? Just set me free!’
The ground, skewed at a forty-five-degree angle, was menacingly gaining presence; the range on his right-hand side stretched its peaks over the shuttle’s flight-path. As it grew closer, Sinus Iridum looked as if it were undergoing a weird and inexplicable transformation. In places the basalt plain seemed to be frozen in a process of decomposition, more mist than solid surface, with dark and mysterious phenomena in it. Little more than one kilometre separated the shuttle from the place where it was bound to crash. A vague blur turned into the line of the magnetic rail, and domes, antennae and scaffolding loomed out of it. Locatelli caught a quick glimpse of a collection of insectoid formations on an incline, and then they too were past, and they went on falling to their doom.