Hanna came running across and bent over him. Locatelli tried to say something, but all that came out was groaning and retching. He didn’t need to look down at himself – which he couldn’t have done anyway – to know that his suit had a tiny tear in it. If he was still alive, it was only because bio-suits didn’t immediately burst like balloons, losing all their air at once.
Perhaps if he kept his hands pressed against the wound—
‘You’re bleeding,’ said Hanna.
‘Sh-shit,’ he managed to gasp. ‘Can you—?’
‘Idiot!’ How strange. The Canadian seemed to be angry. ‘What were you doing? I spared you, for God’s sake! I could have brought you to safety!’
‘I’m – I’m s—’
What? Sorry? Was he apologising to Hanna for allowing himself to be rammed in the body by the Ganymede? Whose fault was that, then, damn it? But right now he felt terribly cold, and he understood that apart from Hanna he had no one now.
‘Please – don’t – let – me—’
‘You’re going to die,’ Hanna said soberly.
‘N-no.’
‘There’s nothing to be done, Warren. The vacuum will suck you empty as soon as you take your hands away.’
Locatelli’s lips moved. Connect me to something, he wanted to say, repair the suit, but all that came out was gurgles and coughing.
‘Every second that we drag things out, you will suffer.’
Suffer? He shook his head weakly. Stupid idea, he thought as he did so. No one can see you anyway. Each saw himself reflected in the helmet of the other. Searing hooks tore at his guts. He groaned.
‘Warren?’ Hanna’s hands approached his helmet. ‘Do you hear me?’
‘Shhhh—’
‘Look at the stars. Look at the starry sky.’
‘Carl—’ he whispered. The pain was almost unbearable.
‘I’m with you. Look at the stars.’
The stars. They circled above Locatelli, sending out messages that he didn’t understand. Not yet. Oh, Christ, he thought, as Hanna busied himself with his helmet, who ever died with such an image before his eyes? How fantastic, in fact.
‘Sh – it,’ he gasped once more, still his favourite word.
His helmet was taken off.
Gaia, Vallis Alpina
However many heads Hydra had, at that moment they all had cause for the greatest concern.
And there had been problems on the horizon. The disaster of 2024 cast its long shadow, since Vic Thorn, the bacillus that they had been cultivating at such expense, had vanished into the expanses of interstellar space. More than a year of dread, month by month, during which the package frayed her nerves, as no one was able to say whether it would be able to survive that long in the lonely bleakness of the crater. Admittedly mini-nukes were almost impossible to find, as Dana Lawrence knew very well, although of course she hadn’t told the assiduous afternoon search party. The little nuclear weapons got their energy from uranium-235. They didn’t give off gamma rays like their beloved cousins, but instead produced alpha waves; even a sheet of paper was enough to dupe detectors. Nonetheless, in a stored state they gave off thermal energy that had to be dispersed somewhere or other, a process performed on Earth by the atmosphere. On the Moon, on the other hand, there were no busily circulating molecules to pick up the little packets of heat and carry them off. To counteract the overheating of an atom bomb in an airless space, you needed big radiators, which the little bomb did not possess, because it was designed to be hidden for three months after the landing of Thorn, who would have been just around the corner from it on the moon base. If everything had gone to plan, Thorn would have positioned the bomb, set the timer, headed for Earth on the pretext of sudden illness, and the rest would have been available to read in the chronicles of noteworthy disasters.
Dana looked with revulsion at Kokoschka’s charred and smoking body. At last she had managed to put out the remaining fires. She couldn’t imagine what kind of inferno was currently raging in Gaia’s sealed-off neck, but there too the flames must already have consumed much of the oxygen that had been there at the outset. The life-saving mask filled her lungs with oxygen, and a visual barrier protected her eyes against the stinging smoke, but the real problem was that she wasn’t going to get out of here very quickly.
And all because of Julian’s crazy daughter!
What the hell was up with Lynn? Never, not during her interviews for the job, and not afterwards, either, had she ever given the impression of being mad. Controlling, certainly. Almost pathological in her striving for perfection, but she also seemed to be more or less perfect. Even until a few days previously, Dana wouldn’t have been able to say anything else about Lynn Orley, except that she was the legitimate architect of three extraordinary hotels, and completely capable of running a global company.
Then, as a complete surprise, the first symptoms of paranoia had appeared and, initially uneasy, Dana had seen a certain potential in them, because the change in Lynn’s nature predestined Lynn for the role of scapegoat. She hadn’t let an opportunity pass to discredit Julian’s daughter and feed suspicions of her dishonesty. But back in the Mama Quilla Club, with Donoghue bellowing in her ear, she had suddenly been filled with the worry that Lynn might spoil everything. For the sake of caution she had followed her, but Lynn had only withdrawn to her suite, so she had gone on to the control centre, to find Sophie Thiel, incapable of any kind of dissemblance, eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Weak nerves, that one, although she deserved to be admired for her meticulous detective work. Dana’s only mistake had promptly become an albatross – not immediately manipulating the recordings after she’d sent the search parties off on their wild goose chase. With a single glance Sophie had worked out that her boss had started the communications block during the conference call between Earth and Moon, on the pretext of loading the video of the corridor. Clever, Sophie, really clever. Aware that digital messengers were terribly indiscreet, Sophie had relied on pen, paper and Kokoschka, and given the infatuated lunkhead the task of looking for Tim, to tell him who the real enemy was. It was only chance that she had ended up in the control centre at the right time; otherwise she might have been unmasked even sooner.
Now the recordings had been corrected, although that probably didn’t matter any more. The opportunity to lock both guests and staff away in Gaia’s head on the pretext of a meeting, and turn their air off, so that she could head for Peary Base, had been irrevocably missed. She was trapped.
Dana breathed deeply into her mask.
The circulators hummed around her. They did battle with the sooty remains of the flames, sucked up the toxic components and pumped fresh oxygen into the wing. More in a spirit of sportsmanship than anything else, Dana got to work on the bulkhead beyond which escalators led down Gaia’s arm into the lower levels, turned on the automatic settings, tried muscle power, with no success. And how could it have worked? In the hermetically sealed area, the partial destruction of the oxygen had produced a slight but serious reduction in pressure. Until it was resolved, the armour plating wasn’t going to budge an inch. She could safely ignore the bulkhead opposite, behind which lay Gaia’s uncontaminated half. It would take at least two hours until pressure was restored. Time enough to wonder about how that bloody detective had managed to penetrate Hydra’s data banks. Any other setbacks could have been coped with, for example the bomb sustaining damage when it fell into the crater, or Julian’s unexpected appearance in the corridor when Hanna had come back from his night-time excursion. Dana had manipulated the data, and skilfully blurred all the traces. No reason for panic.