‘Yeah!’ called Miranda. ‘See, there was nothing to it!’
She laughed and stretched her arms out. O’Keefe went to grab her, but her hands were suddenly out of reach. Confused, he leaned his upper body further forward. She was moving away from him at an ever greater speed, and for a moment he thought Nina had flown away without her. Then he realised the shuttle hadn’t moved an inch.
Gaia’s head was breaking off!
‘Miranda!’ he screamed.
He could hear her choking gasps in his helmet as if she were right there next to him, while her tottering form dwindled before his eyes. She was waving her arms wildly, which in some gruesome way could have been mistaken for a gesture of exuberance, the way they knew her to be, always in a good mood, always pushing herself to the very limit, but as she called O’Keefe’s name, her voice expressed the absolute despair of a person who knew that nothing and no one would be able to save them.
‘Finn! Finn! – Finn!’
‘Miranda!’
Then she fell.
Her body tipped over the cabin shaft, flashed in the sunlight and then disappeared behind the head of Gaia, which did a half-turn, seemed to stand still for a moment, then fell completely from the shoulders, crashing into the immense Romanesque window of the abdominal wall.
‘Inside, everyone inside!’ shouted O’Keefe, his voice cracking. ‘Nina!’
‘What’s wrong, Finn, we—’
‘She fell!’ He jumped into the cargo hold. ‘Miranda fell overboard; you have to go round to the front section.’
‘Is everyone else in?’
His eyes darted around. Next to him, Tim stumbled across, a groaning Olympiada in his arms, and collapsed down to the floor of the hold.
‘Yes! Quickly, for heaven’s sake, go quickly!’
Not waiting until the hatch was closed, he ran like crazy to the connecting bulkhead and pushed himself through while there was still barely a crack’s width open. Stumbling along the central gangway, he was hurled against a seat, the revving of the engines in his ears as Nina steered the Callisto backwards over the figure’s tattered stump of a neck. Then he struggled to his feet again and rushed into the cockpit.
And looked down.
The abdominal cavity was destroyed. Fireballs appeared which extinguished as soon as they were ignited. Rubble rained down as the ribcage containing the suites collapsed floor by floor. Then, Gaia’s immense, regal skull, the glazing on the face surprisingly still intact, rolled over the gentle inclination of the upper thigh towards the valley, passed the knee almost hesitantly and shattered on the plateau two hundred metres below.
‘Go down! Down!’
The shuttle sank, but Miranda was nowhere to be seen, neither on the upper surface of the thigh, now covered in debris, nor on the moon surface around it.
‘To the plateau! She was torn down with it! You have to—’
‘Finn—’
‘No! Look! Look for her!’
Without arguing, Nina turned the shuttle around, descended further and flew in a curve directly over and around the widely scattered remains of the head. By now, the others were gathering together in the space behind the cockpit.
‘She can’t have disappeared!’ screamed O’Keefe.
‘Finn.’
He felt the soft pressure of a hand on his upper arm and turned round. Heidrun had taken her helmet off and was looking at him with red eyes.
‘She can’t have just disappeared,’ he repeated softly.
‘She’s dead, Finn. Miranda’s dead.’
He stared at her.
Then he started to cry. Blinded by tears, he sank to the floor in front of Heidrun. He couldn’t remember ever having cried.
Lynn sat in the first row of seats, distancing herself from the group, completely expressionless. She had beamed her former light for the last time, had unified the group in the glow of the dying star that she was, had illuminated them, blinded and driven back Dana, her enemy, but the fuel of her life’s energy was used up now, her collapse unavoidable. Everything inside her skull was rushing around with maximum kinetic energy: impressions, facts, probability of occurrences. Dependable knowledge was pulverised into hypotheses. The unending condensing of impressions caused them to be fractured into the smallest, the very smallest thought particles, to which no time, no perceptual level, no history could be assigned. Increasingly brief thought phases, thought particles whirling at the speed of light, a collapsing spirit, unceasingly crashing without the opposing pressure of will, falling short of the event horizon, no transmission, only reception now, ongoing compromise, the end of all processes, of all contour, all form, just situation, and even the pitiful remains of what had once been Lynn Orley would corrode and evaporate under their own pressure, leaving nothing behind but an abandoned, imaginary space.
Someone had died. So many had died.
Her memory was empty.
London, Great Britain
Yoyo, presumed missing, had arrived at the stroke of 22.00 just as Diane was carrying out the electronic exhumation of a person presumed dead. Presumed, because no one had been able to get even a fleeting glance of the corpse. Because it was still undiscovered, as all objects moving in unknown or unpredictable orbits tend to be.
‘Victor Thorn, known as Vic,’ Jericho said, without deigning to ask Yoyo why five minutes had turned into three hours and what Tu was up to in his state of rage.
‘I’m sorry, I…’ Yoyo fidgeted hesitantly. She had a frog in her throat and it had to come out. ‘I know I was planning to be back much sooner—’
‘Commander of the first moon base occupation. A NASA man. In 2021, he ran the show for six months.’
‘—Tian isn’t really like that. I mean, you know him.’
‘It seems that Thorn did a good job. So good, that in 2024 they entrusted him with another six-month mission.’
‘To be honest, we haven’t spoken that much,’ said Yoyo, a little shrilly. The frog was croaking on her tongue. ‘He was just terribly angry. We ended up watching a film, pretending everything was normal, you know. It was probably the worst conceivable moment, but you shouldn’t believe—’
‘Yoyo.’ Jericho sighed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s your business. It has nothing to do with me.’
‘Of course it has something to do with you!’
The frog was on the move.
‘No, it doesn’t.’ To his amazement, he meant it. The old, unconquered hurt which had lingered on him so long, like a bad odour on clothes, gave way to the insight that neither Tu nor Yoyo was responsible for his bad mood. However well they were getting on, it really had nothing to do with him. ‘It’s your lives, your story. You don’t have to tell me anything.’
Yoyo stared at the monitor unhappily. Their surroundings left a little to be desired in terms of intimacy. The space in the information centre had been screened in a makeshift way; people were working all around them, like microorganisms in the abdominal cavity of the Big O, digesting and processing information, then expelling it.
‘And if I want to tell you something?’
‘Then now is definitely not a good time.’
‘Fine.’ She sighed. ‘So what’s this about Thorn?’
‘Well, assuming that the explosion of the mini-nuke was planned for 2024 without fail – then someone must have been up there at the time: to hide, position and ignite the bomb. Either that or someone else was supposed to travel on after it and do that.’
‘Sounds logical.’
‘But no explosion was registered, and the people from MI6 think that storing a mini-nuke in a vacuum for too long could pose the risk of a premature decay. So why wasn’t it ignited?’