Cape Heraclides
‘Right, listen to me. I’ve got to get out of here as quickly as possible.’
‘Fine.’
‘I’ve found a grasshopper in the storeroom, and a buggy. As to the hopper, I’m worried that the steering unit was damaged in the impact, but the buggy seems intact. That means we’ve got to get the rear hatch open.’
‘What happens if we can’t get out?’
‘We can get out. It won’t be entirely without danger, but if we put on our spacesuits and hold on tight at the right moment, I can get us out of the Ganymede. You’ll help me to shift the debris and drive the buggy out, then we’ll see how it goes.’
Locatelli blinked suspiciously. ‘If you’re trying to trick me, Carl, then you can do your shit on your own—’
‘If you’re trying to trick me, Warren, I will do my shit on my own – is that clear?’
‘Yes, it is.’ Locatelli nodded respectfully.
Hanna stuck the gun in a holster on his thigh, where it disappeared completely, knelt down behind him and quickly untied him. Locatelli stretched his arms. He was careful not to make any quick movements, extended his fingers, rubbed his wrists. It was only now that he noticed the slight angle of the shuttle. He still felt dazed. He hesitantly made his way to the cockpit and looked outside. Rising terrain stretched before his eyes. There was a fine haze in the air.
Air – what was he thinking of? It was dust, lousy, omnipresent moon dust, which hung like an optical illusion over the slope and settled, a dirty grey, on the glass. It wasn’t being held up by air molecules, so what was keeping the stuff up there?
‘Electrostatics,’ he mused.
‘The dust?’ Hanna joined him. ‘I wondered about that too. We’re very close to the production site, tons of regolith are dug up here. Still, it’s amazing that it doesn’t sink to the ground.’
‘No, I think it does,’ Locatelli guessed. ‘Most of it, anyway. Remember, when we were driving the buggy we stirred up loads of it. It all fell back straight away, apart from the really fine stuff, the microscopic particles.’
‘Never mind. Come on.’
They put on their helmets and body armour and established radio contact. Hanna directed Warren to the rear of the vehicle behind the last row of seats, and pointed to the line of backrests.
‘Set your back against them,’ he said. ‘To protect you. The panes in the cockpit must be made of armoured glass, so I’ll aim at one of the struts. The explosive power should be enough to crack them. Otherwise, we’ll have to expect a considerable amount of flying splinters. If we’re successful there’s going to be a hell of a draught, so stay in the lee of the seats and hold on tight.’
‘What about the oxygen? Won’t it go up in flames?’
‘No, the concentration’s the same as it is on Earth. Ready?’
Locatelli crouched behind the row of seats. In other circumstances he would have been splendidly amused, but even as it was he couldn’t complain about a lack of adrenalin release.
‘Ready,’ he said.
Hanna pushed in beside him, brought an almost identical-looking gun out of a holster on his other thigh, leaned into the central aisle and pointed the barrel into the cockpit. Locatelli thought he heard a high-frequency hiss, and then came a detonation, so short that the explosion seemed to swallow itself just as it was produced—
Then came the suction.
Objects, splinters and shards came flying from all directions, whirled wildly around, past him and towards the cockpit. Anything that wasn’t screwed or welded down was dragged outside. The escaping air pulled on his arms and legs, and pressed him against the seat-backs. Something struck his visor, indefinable things hit his shoulders and hips, a bat swarm of brochures and books came flying aggressively at them, covers flapping frantically. A volume suddenly clung to his chest armour, slid reluctantly along it, pages fluttering, broke away and disappeared down the aisle. Everything happened in complete silence.
Then it was over.
Was it really? Locatelli waited another few seconds. He slowly pulled himself up along the back of the seat and looked towards the cockpit. Where the front panes had been, a huge hole now gaped.
‘My goodness.’ He gasped for breath. ‘What is that thing you’re firing there?’
‘Homemade, secret.’ Hanna got up and stepped into the aisle. ‘Come on, we’ve got to get back to the storeroom.’
The storeroom looked less chaotic than Locatelli had expected. The individual parts of a grasshopper lay strewn over the floor. He picked them up, one by one. The steering unit had been partly destroyed, but the buggy was undamaged in its mountings – a small two-seater vehicle with a flat bed for cargo. Additional mountings indicated that if need be, six such vehicles could be transported. He quickly helped Hanna unfasten the buggy. The loading hatch, which was also the back wall of the storeroom, was slightly open, as if it had been dented in the impact. A hand’s breadth of starry sky gleamed in at them. Hanna walked over to a rolling wall, opened it, took out batteries and two survival backpacks and stuffed everything on the bed of the buggy. They left the cargo area and helped each other out of the hole in the cockpit. The ground lay some metres below them. Locatelli jumped nimbly down, rounded the nose of the beached Ganymede and, holding his breath, looked out across the plain.
It was a ghostly sight.
As far as the eye could see, areas of swirled-up regolith stretched across the Sinus Iridum to form the swirling shape of a bell. Where the dust became more permeable, the velvety nature of the background seemed to have made way for a darker consistency. A swathe of destruction led from the clouds of dust to the beach of the rising rocky terrain on which they stood, continued there as a jagged gap, described an upward curve and ended at the shuttle which, as Locatelli recognised now, had collided with an overhang and produced an avalanche. Boulders of all sizes had piled up around the tail of the Ganymede; some had rattled down the hill, but one of the biggest bits of rubble blocked the lower third of the rear hatch. The craggy ridge of the Jura Mountains ran to the north-west.
‘Not all that much,’ Hanna observed. ‘I was afraid the rubble would reach all the way up.’
‘No, it’s not much,’ Locatelli confirmed sourly. ‘It’s just that they’re bloody enormous. That one there must weigh several tonnes.’
‘Divided by six. Let’s get to work.’
Gaia, Vallis Alpina
At half past six, Dana called the search parties back to headquarters. Lynn and Sophie had scoured most of the staff accommodation and part of the suites in the thorax, Michio Funaki and Ashwini Anand had crept like cockroaches through the greenhouses, and had turned every scrap of green and every tomato upside down before devoting themselves to the meditation centre and the multi-religious church. The third team, last of all, was able to report that the pool, the health centre and the casino were, as Kokoschka put it, clean, stressing the word like Philip Marlowe after patting down a suspect.
‘And that’s exactly where the problem lies,’ said Dana. ‘In appearance. Have we had a chance to look inside the walls and floors? In the life-support systems?’
Kokoschka waved his detector tellingly. ‘Didn’t even click.’
‘Yes, of course, but we don’t know enough about mini-nukes.’
‘It was your idea to search the hotel,’ Lynn said furiously. ‘So don’t start telling us it was pointless. And besides, Sophie and I did look in the life-support systems, anywhere there might be room for such a thing.’