She opened the catch, lifted the cover to the keypad, and hesitated.
When should she set the detonator for? By now everybody knew that there was an attack planned. They still believed that it was aimed at Gaia, and she had done all she could to encourage that. But perhaps the search parties up on Aristarchus might realise what was going on. What if they came back, knowing that the base itself was in danger, and then started to search here at the Pole?
She mustn’t give them enough time to find the bomb.
A short fuse, then.
Dana shivered. Better if she wasn’t vaporised by the nuclear blast herself. Right now, her fingers were hovering over the control panel of a miracle of destructive technology which could turn Peary Crater into one of the circles of hell, sweeping away every trace of human presence as though it had never been. A good idea then to be as far away as possible, but when would the search parties return, when would the Charon set off? The safe option to make sure that she survived would be to set the detonator at twenty-four hours. But what if the communications jam failed prematurely, and they learned that the mini-nuke really was here at the Pole?
There was no way they could find that out.
But they could. The very fact that they knew that the bomb existed at all proved that they could find out anything. Callisto must have reached the Aristarchus Plateau by now. If they had found any survivors, then she could expect them back soon. If not, then they would keep searching for who knew how long. She couldn’t decide based on what she thought the shuttles might do. She had to arm this bomb, hijack the Charon and then fly to OSS. She’d have a lot of explaining to do once she got there; why she had flown off without the others, why she had flown off at all, how she could have known about the bomb. Especially if there were any survivors, who could bring all her carefully placed lies tumbling down.
But she would have to deal with that when it happened. She had been trained to deal with that sort of thing.
Her fingers twitched, indecisive.
Then she punched in a timecode, piled the rocks up in front of the bomb again and squirmed hastily backwards. The inferno was set. Time to get out of here.
Igloo 1
Wachowski was visibly startled.
‘What are you doing here?’
Lynn looked down at him, mildly surprised to see herself in his eyes as he so clearly saw her, a pale phantom with wild hair, looming up silently as though driven into the room by a gust of wind, an apparition: Lady Madeline Usher, Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein, the very image of a B-movie. Quite astonishing, how clearly she could see all these pictures shining out in the darkness of her thoughts, now that her sanity had fled the scene – although it had obviously left a breadcrumb trail to guide the little girl lost back into the waking world.
Follow your thoughts, astral voices whispered to her. Go into the light, into the light, star-child, they muttered, higher intelligences without need of physical bodies but with a twisted sense of humour, who lured unsuspecting astronauts into monoliths, dumping them into bad copies of Louis XIV bedrooms, just as had happened to poor Bowman, who—
Bowman? Lady Madeline?
This is my mind, she screamed. My mind, Julian!
And her scream, that brave little scream, set out, bold little fellow, dragged itself the whole long way out to the event horizon, then lost its strength, lost its courage, tottered over backwards and died.
‘Are you all right?’
Wachowski cocked his head. Interesting. The way the snaking arteries at his temples busily pumped blood showed he was on edge, alert. Lynn could see the tiny submarines sailing through the flow.
‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
Submarines in the blood. Dennis Quaid in Innerspace. No. Raquel Welch and Donald Pleasence, Fantastic Voyage. The o-o-o-o-riginal!
Oh, yes. Sorry, Daddy.
She was contaminated ground. Poisoned by Julian. No mistake, there he was, teasing her, making a fool of her with his movie mania. Whenever she thought she had reached her real self, there she was in one of his worlds, Alice in Orley-Land, eternal heroine in his invention, his original creation.
You’re mad, Lynn, she thought. You’ve ended up like Crystal. First depressive, then mad.
Or had Julian written this role for her as well?
His flashing eyes, his floating hands, whenever he took her and Tim into his private cinema, where they had to watch every metre of celluloid or digital drama that ever a science-fiction author or director had dreamed up: Georges Méliès’ Le voyage dans la lune, Fritz Lang’s Girl in the Moon, Nathan Juran’s First Men in the Moon, This Island Earth with Jeff Morrow and Faith Domergue and the mutant – oh my word, that mutant! – Star Trek, The Man Who Fell to Earth, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Alien, Independence Day, War of the Worlds, Perry Rhodan with Finn O’Keefe, hey, Finn O’Keefe, wasn’t he somewhere hereabouts, and always – fanfare! – Lynn Orley, the lead role in—
‘You really gave me a shock.’
Wachowski. All alone in the twilit control room, surrounded by screens and consoles. Shouldn’t make such a fuss, the bastard. He looked a fright himself.
‘That’s good,’ Lynn whispered.
She leaned down to him, put her hand to the back of his neck and pressed her lips to his. Mm-hm, warm, that was good. She was Grace Kelly. Wasn’t she? And he—
‘Miss Orley, Lynn—’ Cary Grant stiffened.
Sorry, is this the right set for To Catch a Thief?
Funny. That wasn’t even a science-fiction film. Julian liked it, though.
Click, hssss, verify.
You lost the hotel.
Another of those lit-up signposts. What was she doing here? What the hell was she doing in the control room, with her nose full of Wachowski’s greasy smell? She pushed him away, started back and wiped her lips in disgust.
‘Are you okay?’ he whispered, in fascinated horror.
‘Never better!’ she snarled at him. ‘Do you have anything to drink?’
He jumped to his feet, nodding.
Glug, glug, and her thoughts were draining away once more, whirled down the plug. When he put the glass of water in her hand, she couldn’t even remember having asked for it.
Hanna
He had given the residential towers a wide berth, trudging past them in an arc along the edge of the chasm. The canyon was a collapsed lava channel, and not all of its walls were sheer drops; rather they formed staircases and steps, so that Hanna could make his way down easily. To the west, the canyon opened out into a steep valley that cut through Peary Crater’s flank, while to his right, towards the base, the chasm grew narrower. Standing on its floor, Hanna could just about see the tops of two residential towers, shining in the sunlight, and two bridges, not far apart, that spanned the canyon above. It was dark down here, and the canyon floor was strewn with rubble. He picked his way through under the first bridge, following a groove in the rock that led him like a path over the gently sloping ground, as far as the second bridge. Then he twisted to look upwards.
About ten metres above him, a hole yawned in the cliff-face.
Several such holes dotted the rock where lava tubes opened up into the canyon, but this one in particular interested him. He clambered up, reached the opening, then switched on his helmet lamp and made his way into the twisting cave. The cave mouth was steep for a moment, and then levelled off. His headlamp caught the ragged gap through to where the bomb lay slumbering. For a moment he considered skipping the visit to the control room and programming the thing straight away, but he had to speak to Dana first. A lot could have happened in the past few hours that would force them to make a whole new plan, and on top of that he urgently needed information to help him see where he stood personally. If all was going according to plan, the laser link between the base and Gaia would be functioning, but Dana would have fixed it so that all signals went straight through to her mobile phone.