What the—?
‘The bulkhead is closing,’ she cried. ‘Hey, they’re locking us in!’
Baffled, she stepped closer to get a glimpse through the crack of what lay below.
A figure of flame came flying at her. The demon hissed and roared at her, reached for her with sparks flying from its finger, singed her eyelids, brows and hair. She stumbled, fell and pushed herself up as she tried to get away from the raging flames.
‘Oh, shit!’ she cried. ‘Get out, Sushma, get out!’
The demon tumbled and licked its way around, multiplied, giving birth to new, twitching creatures that darted around gleefully setting ablaze anything that stood in their way. With uncanny speed they covered the glass façade, found little of interest there and concentrated their campaign on the floor, the pillars and the furniture. Miranda leapt to her feet, hurried up the stairs, driving the distraught Sushma ahead of her with a series of loud shrieks. The bulkheads to Selene were closing right above them. A wall of heat was surging at them from behind. Sushma stumbled. Miranda slapped her on the backside, and Sushma pushed her way past the bulkhead to the next floor up.
Close! Christ, that was close!
Like a gymnast, she grabbed the edge of the bulkhead and pulled herself up on it. For a moment she was afraid her ankle would get stuck in the lock, but then, by a hair, she got into Selene, and the bulkhead closed with a dull thud and saved them from the wave of fire.
‘The others,’ she panted. ‘God alive! The others!’
Dana was lying on her back, Kokoschka’s legs pedalling wildly above her, hammering the steps of the spiral staircase. The roar of the fire reached her from the neck, followed by the flames themselves, greedily creeping up Kokoschka’s jacket and trousers. They looked as if they were feeling, searching for something. They flowed in waves over the ceiling, the structure and its coverings in its quest for food.
Dana leapt to her feet.
She had to dislodge Kokoschka’s body so that the bulkhead could close. Oxygen fires were uncontrollable, hotter and more destructive than any conventional kind. Even though the gas as such didn’t burn, it fatally encouraged the destruction of all kinds of material, and it was heavier than air. The blaze would spill like lava from Gaia’s throat and engulf the entire suite section. One leap and she was at the manual control panel, crouched down to get as far as she could from the heat, and activated the mechanism that operated the bulkhead. It opened, and Kokoschka was free. He dashed down the steps and leapt onto the gallery, kicking instinctively around. Tentacles of flame shot from the gap, as if to drag back the prey that had just been snatched from them. But the bulkhead closed on them, cutting off the blaze and isolating Gaia’s neck from its shoulders.
The chef was a human torch. A fog of chemical extinguishing agents forced its way out of the ventilation system, but it wasn’t nearly enough. In a few moments, the plants, the walls, the floor would all be ablaze. Dana pulled a portable CO2 fire extinguisher from the wall, emptied it on the body now lying motionless and then pointed what was left at the ceiling. In the inferno above her, the extinguisher system had probably given up long ago. By now the temperatures up there must be unimaginable. Sooty smoke entered her airways and blinded her eyes. Her chest began to hurt. If she didn’t get fresh air in a minute, she would die of smoke poisoning. Kokoschka and the stairs and parts of the ceiling were still smouldering away, little fires still flared here and there, but instead of trying to quell them, she staggered along the gallery, eyes streaming, unable to breathe, the creak and clatter of the bulkhead in her ears, now sealing off Gaia’s shoulder. Where the gallery ended in the figure’s right arm, there was an emergency storeroom which contained, alongside the inevitable candles, some oxygen masks. She quickly put one of the masks on, greedily sucked in the oxygen and watched as access to the arm was sealed off.
She hadn’t been fast enough.
She was trapped.
Tim managed to catch up with his sister in the hall. She’d been trying to escape across the glass bridges, leaping like a satyr but with her knees trembling, so that he was terrified he was about to watch her slip to her doom, but nothing could stop her attempt to escape. It was only at the last jump that she faltered, fell and crept away on all fours. Tim jumped down immediately behind her and grabbed her ankle. Lynn’s elbows bent. She slipped away on her belly, trying to escape him. He held her firmly, turned her on her back and received a smack in the face. Lynn panted, grunted, tried to scratch him. He gripped her wrists and forced her down.
‘No!’ he cried. ‘Stop! It’s me!’
She raged and snapped at him. It was like fighting a rabid animal. Now that her hands had been immobilised, she struck out with her legs, threw herself back and forth, then suddenly rolled her eyes and lay slack. Her breathing was fitful. For a moment he was afraid he was going to lose her to unconsciousness, then he saw her eyelids flutter. Her eyes cleared. ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’m with you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she whimpered. ‘I’m so sorry!’
She started sobbing. He let go of her wrists, took her in his arms and started rocking her like a baby.
‘Help me, Tim. Please help me.’
‘I’m here. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.’
‘No, it isn’t.’ She pressed herself against him, clawed her fingers into the fabric of his jacket. ‘I’m going mad. I’m losing my mind. I—’
The rest was drowned by fresh sobbing, and Tim felt as unprepared as a schoolboy, even though it was the terrifying spectre of this situation that had prompted him to come on Julian’s idiotic pleasure trip in the first place. But now his brain threatened to go on strike on grounds of continuous overload and abandon him to naked terror. He threw back his head and looked at the phantom of smoke in the dome of the atrium, menacingly spreading its wings. Something grew from the balconies, metal plates, enormous bulkheads, and he started to sense that something terrible was going on up there.
Cape Heraclides, Montes Jura
For the first few minutes they had made quick progress, until it turned out that the bigger boulders supported one another, and developed a curious dynamism of their own as soon as you removed one of them. Several times he and Hanna were nearly crushed by a rolling rock. Whenever Locatelli jumped out of the way at the last second, his mind came up with bold scenarios of cause and effect in which debris – guided in precise trajectories – would crush Hanna as flat as a pancake. The Achilles heel of all these plans was that nothing in the field of debris around Ganymede lent itself to precise calculation, so he resigned himself to cooperation. They carried the rubble down, alert, watching out for each other’s safety, they pushed, pulled, dragged and lifted, and after two hours of backbreaking work they reached their physical limits. Several of the colossal boulders showed some movement, to be sure, but refused to be shifted. Breathless, Locatelli leaned against one of the rocks and was amazed not to hear Hanna panting like a dog as well.
Clearly the Canadian was in better shape.
‘What now?’ he asked.
‘What indeed. We’ve got to get the hatch open.’
‘Oh really, Cleverdick? Shame it’s impossible.’
Hanna leaned down and studied the blockage. Locatelli could hear the gears whirring in his head.
‘Why don’t you chuck one of your bombs in?’ he suggested. ‘Let’s blow these bloody things up.’
‘No, the energy would disperse outside. Although—’ Hanna hesitated, stepped over and crouched down to a spot where two of the rocks touched. His hand dug into the crack in the ground and brought out some gravel. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’